Hrm: Job Involvement & Its Dimensions

JOB INVOLVEMENT Job involvement can be defined as “psychological identification with one’s work” as well as “the degree to which the job situation is central to the employee and his or her identity”. As employees with a high degree of job involvement are more likely to regard work as the center of their self-concepts (Frone & Russell, 1995), they are also more likely to increase their self-respect through successful job performance (Burke, 1991) and display of organizational beneficial behaviors (Diefendorff, Brown, Kamin, & Lord, 2002).

Brown (1996) opined that employees with high job involvement would have greater psychological identification with their work, which in turn would increase job satisfaction. Mowday, Porter, and Steers (1982) also pointed out that employees’ psychological needs are gradually satisfied as the employees become involved with their jobs and that this satisfaction establishes a sense of organizational commitment. Researchers have revealed that employees with a high degree of job satisfaction or organizational commitment display a higher degree of Organizational Commitment Behavior (OCB) (Podsakoff et al. 2000). These studies suggest that job involvement has a positive influence on OCB. Task variety might mitigate employees’ involvement in their jobs, which in turn would have a negative effect on their display of OCB. Factors affecting job involvement: 1. Job involvement and empowerment: Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. Empowering the employees means providing them with higher level tasks, responsibility and decision making in the performance of their job.

According to Wilkinson et al. (1998) and Karia and Asaari (2006), empowerment is a dominant HRM/TQM practice; there was a strong association with job involvement. 2. Job involvement and teamwork Teamwork is defined as a joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group. Over the years, HRM/TQM policies have come to recognize and emphasize the importance of teamwork to facilitate employees’ ability to work together to get a job done (Morrow, 1997; Karia & Ahmad, 2000).

A study by Osland (1997) found that working together with a production unit leads to better employee attitudes. 3. Job involvement and Communication Communication is an important factor in organizations, for connecting employees and permitting organizations to function, as well as an essential element to the implementation of HRM/TQM (Gray & Laidlaw, 2002). When communication is open and continuous in three directions, (up, down and across) work processes and performance increases.

This in turn increases employees’ job involvement. 4. Job involvement and employee participation A study conducted by Karia and Ahmad (2000) found that employee participation, predicts significantly towards job involvement. In some other surveys though, results indicate that lack of participation would not be able to improve employees’ personal abilities and capabilities, help them change certain aspects of personal traits and increase their self-respect. 5. Job involvement and leadership

There is a weak relationship between leadership and employees’ job involvement. The lack of top management commitment from any particular group within these organizations can be a serious barrier in the management of quality and it is one of the reasons for the failure of HRM/TQM efforts on job involvement amongst employees (Wilkinson et al. 1998). A study by De Hoogh et al. (2005), which found that leadership has a positive influence on employee outcomes. 6. Job involvement and Training and Development

It is important that management understand these activities tend to require long-term commitment, as results are not immediately realized. Therefore, the training department must provide continuous training and development in ensuring the success of HRM/TQM practices in contributing improvement in job involvement. The findings of Karia and Ahmad (2000) regarding training and development, states that employees’ can generate innovative ideas for solving problems; and it helps employees’ in their personal involvement. Impact of Job Involvement

Cohen’s (1999) research supported the important status of job involvement as an antecedent to organizational commitment. Specifically, Cohen argued that those individuals with high levels of job involvement, which stem from positive experiences on-the-job (Kanungo, 1979; Witt, 1993), make attributions for these experiences to the organization. Thus, having previously received benefits from the organization and being obligated by the norm of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960) to repay them, high job involvement employees feel compelled to reciprocate in some form.

Cohen (1999, p. 292) asserted that “to the extent that positive experiences are attributed to the efforts of organizational officials, these are reciprocated with increased affective organizational commitment to the persons who caused them”. This increased affective commitment (i. e. where employees adopt the company’s goals as their own and, therefore, desire to remain with the organization to help it achieve its goals (Meyer & Allen, 1984; Mowday et al. 1979) later is found to reduce turnover intentions, absence behaviour, and/or turnover (Cohen, 2000; Hackett et al. 2001), as well as increase job performance (Carmeli and Freund, 2001). Given the fact that job involvement is thought to be an important determinant of effort and motivation, and other job attitudes have been shown to positively relate to OCBs (Van Scotter, 2000), it is anticipated that those high in job involvement will engage in more OCBs. Theory suggests that these gender differences may be more evident for OCB-Is (i. . , behaviors directed toward others, such as helping), than for the less communal OCB-Os (i. e. , behaviors directed toward the organization). Regardless of a person’s sex, it may be expected that an individual high in job involvement will feel compelled to engage in OCB-Os, such as staying late, attending non-mandatory meetings, and not taking extra breaks. Alternatively, OCB-Is may be exhibited at different levels for highly involved women and highly involved men.

Specifically, women who are deeply involved in their work may feel more obliged to help others than equally involved men, because women may internalize the belief that they should act communally and help others. Thus, highly involved women may engage in more OCB-Is (operationalized as altruism, courtesy, and possibly sportsmanship) than highly involved men, suggesting that sex will moderate the relationship between job involvement and OCB-Is. In terms of the specific OCB dimensions, the Civic Virtue dimension is most closely related to job involvement.

Conceptually this finding makes sense given that Civic Virtue is defined as the level of involvement a person has in the political life of the organization. The fact that both the OCB-O dimensions (Conscientiousness and Civic Virtue) and in-role performance were predicted by job involvement regardless of sex, lends credence to the idea that exhibiting behaviors such as staying late, attending meetings, and completing task duties are performed at the same level for involved men and women.

These dimensions represent behaviors that can be thought of as facilitating task performance and enhancing the environment surrounding one’s focal tasks. Job Satisfaction and job involvement Job involvement (Employee engagement, or Work engagement), is a concept that is generally viewed as managing discretionary effort, that is, when employees have choices, they will act in a way that furthers their organization’s interests. An engaged employee is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work.

Several Studies have shown that there exists a direct relationship between Job Involvement and Job Satisfaction. Past research on voluntary turnover has produced very extensive and sophisticated models; however, a recent and more parsimonious model of turnover utilizes only two employee work attitudes to predict turnover propensity. These two attitudes are job involvement and organizational commitment. The premise discussed here is that job involvement and organizational commitment interact jointly to affect turnover.

For example, the job employees do helps them meet their intrinsic needs, such as satisfactorily performing a challenging job, which, in turn, increases their sense of competence. This leads to increasing employees’ job involvement attitude. Likewise, the organization helps employees meet their social and other extrinsic reward needs, such as pay, fringe benefits and promotions. This leads to increasing employees’ organizational commitment attitude.