Introduction
The purpose of this essay will be to determine the influence of individual work values on the commitment of an employee to an organization. This essay will seek to define the meaning of work values and also employee commitment and how work values influence the commitment of an employee to an organization.
The type of organization that will be evaluated will be a multinational telecommunications corporation (Vodafone) that has a high number of employees and handles a large customer base.
The essay will seek to determine the kind of organizational factors that exist within the multinational company that affect the work values and organizational commitment of the employees as well as the available structures of work values that are used in many multinational organizations around the world.
The discussion will mostly involve the use of American literature and research work that is available for the last ten years which has offered extensive feedback on the topic.
The focus on Vodafone will be suitable for this study given the diverse number of employees that work for the multinational company around its global offices. The company employs over 80,000 employees around the world who are from diverse ethnic backgrounds and possess individual work values that are necessary when it comes to their job performance.
The study will therefore discuss the concepts of work values and employee commitment by focusing on the global telecommunications company so as to gain a more practical interaction of how work values influence or affect employee commitment to an organization.
Work Values
The concept of work values has continued to receive increasing interest amongst various scholars and researchers around the world, especially with regards to its influence on the individual commitment of an employee to their organization.
To better understand the concept, work values are referred to as the set of traits or qualities that are considered to be important by an employee in the performance of their work duties and responsibilities. They are also defined as those qualities that employees within an organization desire to have when performing their work.
Work values are viewed as measures of employee performance since they determine the efficiency and effectiveness of a worker when it comes to completing certain tasks within the organization.
They also provide a measure of the work preferences, ethics, culture and beliefs of the employee, which prove to be beneficial when it comes to performing organizational tasks. Work values also provide a measure of personal need and satisfaction as they allow an employee to reflect upon their individual goals and objectives in the workplace and what they have to do to satisfy their needs (Levy 2003).
Dose (Cited by Matic 2008) defined work values as the standards of evaluation related to work, which employees used to measure the importance and significance of work preferences.
Dose further categorises work values to fall under two dimensions with the first dealing with work values that are based on moral dimensions and the second dealing with the degree of consensus that exists on the importance and desirability of particular work values.
According to Matic (2008), the very first studies of work values were conducted to explain the differences of employee performance and worker motivation when it came to job performance.
Researchers such as Hoppe and Hofstede, who were some of the theorists that conducted early studies on the effect of work values, had their research work incorporated into the development of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and also Herzberg’s explanation of intrinsic and extrinsic needs.
Matic (2008) noted that Hofstede and Hoppe’s work played an important part in providing a theoretical explanation of how work values motivated employees to perform their work duties.
Based on both current and recent research, work values present a strong implication for many managers as they determine the level of motivation an employee will have towards their job and also the kind of job satisfaction employees will derive from performing their work duties.
Before assigning any duties and tasks, managers usually observe the work values of their employees so that they can be able to determine what work ethic and motivation they possess when carrying out their work duties.
Vodafone, as a multinational corporation, is constantly facing changing and evolving management practices, which has forced its management to continually re-evaluate the work duties and responsibilities of their employees.
In doing so, the company also has to consider the individual work values of its employees to ensure that the management practices and work duties do not conflict with the individual behaviours of an employee. Therefore identifying the work values of an employee plays an important role in redefining work duties and responsibilities within an organization.
According to Hofstede (2001), the work values possessed by an individual worker are usually significant for two reasons; the first of which being that they provide an excellent measure of an employee’s work ethic since they are determined by sociological and cultural factors.
The second reason is that work values have a direct impact on the various faucets and activities that occur within an organization such as employee motivation, job satisfaction, conflict resolution and employee commitment to the organization.
As a result of this, many organizations around the world have restructured their activities to encompass work values, which will be important in achieving value congruence in business operations (Hofstede 2001).
Because the image of an organization is closely linked to the work ethics the organization wants to convey to its various stakeholders, the individual work values of an employee in all the levels of management become increasingly important, especially for a corporation such as Vodafone that has a large employee base.
Work values become important since they provide managers with a perspective of what is right and wrong within an organization
According to Matic (2008), work values encompass emotions, cognitive processes and behaviour that are related to the performance of work duties and responsibilities where employees demonstrate work value characteristics such as individuality, punctuality, attentiveness, subjectiveness and cooperation towards their organizational tasks and duties.
The personality of an individual is also an important factor when it comes to determining the work values of an employee and this, therefore, contributes to the overall performance of an employee in their work duties. The implication of work values on multinational corporations becomes important, especially when it comes to organizational performance and leadership.
Given the large numbers of employees who work for Vodafone, job performance becomes a top priority due to the large volume of customer queries that are handled by the global telecommunications company in a day or an hour.
Leadership also becomes important to such an organization, especially when managers have to delegate certain roles to their junior staff, such as monitoring the floor operations of the call centre or monitoring the number of calls that have been made in an hour.
Apart from organizational performance and leadership, other implications of work values to an organization are that they assist managers to prepare employees during periods of change, they assist human resource managers to develop suitable and effective reward/compensation systems, they affect changes in management practices and leadership styles and they facilitate open communication within an organization (Li, 2008).
Employee Commitment
Employee commitment, which is at times referred to as organizational commitment is the psychological attachment that an employee has to their place of work.
The most common measures that are used to determine the commitment of an employee to an organization include job satisfaction which deals with the feelings an employee has towards their job and organizational identification which is the degree of belonging and oneness that an employee derives from working for an organization.
To further explain employee commitment, Meyer and Allen developed a three-component model of commitment that would be used to identify the various types of commitment that existed within an organization (Mutheveloo and Rose 2005).
The affective commitment level, which is the first part of the model refers to the positive emotional attachment that an employee demonstrates towards their workplace. According to Meyer and Allen, employee’s who were affectively committed to an organization were able to identify with the goals and objectives of an organization which in turn enabled them to have sense of belonging.
Employees who demonstrated affective commitment usually did so because they personally wanted to display attachment and loyalty to the organization. The second part of the model was referred to as continuance commitment which refers to an individual’s commitment to the organization based on their perceived cost of losing organizational membership.
This perceived loss is in terms of economic benefits which the employee gains from committing to an organization, social costs such as friendship ties with co-workers and also financial costs such as rewards and compensations that arise from belonging to an organization (Mutheveloo and Rose 2005).
The third part of Meyer and Allen’s commitment model was normative commitment which refers the feelings of obligation that an employee has towards an organization. These feelings are usually derived from a variety of sources such as when an organization has invested in the training and development of the employee.
An employee in such a case feels obligated to the organization to work extra hard in their work duties so that they can be able to repay the organization for the training exercise. This three-component model of employee commitment therefore explains the various levels/types of commitment that an employee has towards an organization.
According to Mutheveloo and Rose (2005), the concept of employee commitment forms the basis for most human resource management activities within an organization as most human resource policies are directed towards increasing the level of employee commitment with an organization.
Various researchers such as Meyer et al. have set out to identify the various types of employee commitment by viewing them as constructs that can be used to explain the attitudes and behaviours of employees when performing their work duties.
Meyer et al. developed three groups that would be used to explain employee commitment to an organization with the first group being commitment to their work or job where employees demonstrated feelings of attachment towards their job and work responsibilities. Employees with this kind of commitment derived a sense of job satisfaction because of their commitment to work (Mutheveloo and Rose 2005).
Work/job commitment according to the researchers did not however refer to the level of commitment that an employee had to the organization or their jobs. It instead focused on the level of their commitment towards the employment itself where an employee’s sense of duty towards their work was seen as a strong measure of employee commitment.
The second group according to Meyer et al. was career/professional commitment where employees demonstrated a sense of commitment or attachment to jobs that guaranteed them career progression. This category also explained employee attachment to be in the form of any professional training offered to an employee that was meant to improve their professional qualifications (Mutheveloo and Rose 2005).
The third category that would be used to explain employee commitment according to Meyer et al. was organizational commitment which refers to the willingness of employees to accept organizational goals, objectives, beliefs and values as their own by working to achieve them.
The researchers noted organizational commitment was a subset of employee commitment as it required the full involvement and participation of employees in work-related activities Other researchers who developed models that could be used to explain employee commitment within an organization include Angle and Perry with their 1981 model of value commitment, O’Reilly and Chatman with their multidimensional model of compliance, identification and internalization and Jaros et al. with their multidimensional model of affective, continuance and moral levels of employee commitment (Muthuveloo and Rose 2005).
These categorizations and models of employee commitment demonstrate the importance of employee commitment when it comes to motivation to perform work duties within the workplace.
Vodafone has conducted various employee satisfaction surveys to determine the level of commitment that its employees have to the company. These surveys usually take place once every year and they are usually conducted with the sole purpose of determining employee commitment to the global telecommunications company.
The survey also assesses job security, career progression within the company, management practices of senior executives within the organization as well as the overall satisfaction of employees within the organization. The two most important indicators that are used in the survey include employee commitment and employee satisfaction as they form the benchmark of Vodafone in all the international and local divisional offices.
Influence of Work Values on Employee Commitment
According to researchers such as Mottaz, Bruning and Snyder, work values play a significant role in the commitment of an employee to an organization, especially when the work values manifest themselves in the behaviour of the employee.
These researchers highlight the fact that employee commitment usually arises from a set of values displayed by an employee towards their work for an extended period of time. Researchers such as Huang, Kidron and Charanyanada have viewed work values to be a major influence of employee commitment because work values strengthen the attachment an employee has towards their organization.
Charanyanada in his 1980 study highlighted the fact that an employee’s investment of time and energy demonstrated the reciprocal relationship that existed between commitment and work values (Ho 2006).
Since work values encompass the behaviour and personality of an individual, the interaction that exists between the individual’s personal characteristics and their work environment is termed to be dynamic as it determines the level of commitment that the employee will have towards the organization.
If the interaction is weakened over time, the individual might lose their sense of commitment forcing them to leave the organization and if the interaction is reinforced the individual might decide to increase their level commitment to the organization by engaging in more work duties.
The various characteristics that make up an employee’s work values, therefore, have a direct influence on the commitment of the employee to the organization (Ho 2006).
Work values according Wollack (cited by Ho 2006) are an important construct of employee commitment to an organization as they play an integral role when it comes to influencing the affective responses of an employee in their place of work. Wollack argues that the work values an employee possesses are usually gained from past work experience within the organization and they, therefore, play an important in determining how an employee will perform their work duties within the organization.
Wollack continues further with his argument on the influence work values have on the commitment of an employee by stating that the personal characteristics of an individual employee usually interact with the stimuli and environmental conditions that exist in the workplace to form the work values that an employee possesses (Ho 2006).
According to other researchers such as Brown who conducted his studies in 1996, Mathieu and Zajac who conducted their studies in 1990 and Rabinowitz and Hall who conducted their studies on work values in 1977, work values have an effect on the overall commitment of an employee to the organization as they represent the three work attitudes that are required from all employees which include job involvement, career salience and organizational commitment.
Because work values represent the psychological investment an employee has placed on their work, they play a great role in determining whether an employee will remain loyal and attached to the organization.
Rokeach concedes that work values are usually gained during the socialisation process that an employee goes through once they become oriented to the organization. Rokeach also concedes that the most valuable socialisation for a human being usually occurs in the home during their formative years and at work when they begin to shape their careers (Ho 2006).
Other researchers who have conducted investigations into the relationship between work values and organizational commitment include Putti et al. in 1989 (cited by Ho 2006) where they noted that the intrinsic work values of an employee had a more direct impact on employee commitment when compared to the extrinsic work values.
Intrinsic values refer to those factors that determine whether the employee’s work is interesting or challenging while the extrinsic values refer to the job benefits an employee gains from tasks that are unrelated to the work job. An example of an extrinsic value is good pension plans, holiday allowances and good medical cover (Ho 2006).
Employees working for multinational telecommunication companies such as Vodafone have demonstrated both extrinsic and intrinsic work values as they both determine the rates of employee turnover in the company, employee motivation and job satisfaction.
According to Tayyab and Tariq (2001 cited by Ho 2006), intrinsic work values were related to normative or norm-based employee commitment to an organization while the extrinsic work values had a relation to the reward-based commitment employee demonstrated towards an organization.
The two authors also identified the existence of a positive correlation between intrinsic work values and the commitment of employees by particularly focusing on executives who worked for the private sector. Based on this relationship, they were able to ascertain that these executives were more committed to an organization when their personal work values were in congruence with those of their direct line managers (Ho 2006).
Huang noted that work values such as employee responsibility and personal achievement were perfect indicators of the level of employee commitment as well as job satisfaction and involvement. Huang also believed that the more work values an employee possessed, the higher their level of commitment to the organization.
Other researchers Lee and Chung (2001, cited by Ho 2006) identified the instrumental work values that exist within most multinational corporations such as Vodafone that have an impact on employee commitment within an organization.
These work values include the stability and freedom of anxious considerations which according to the two researchers was the strongest influencing factor of employee commitment to an organization.
The consideration of economic security was the second most important factor that influenced employee commitment followed by social interaction considerations which involved the social interactions that employees had with their colleagues in the workplace.
The consideration of stability and freedom had a direct influence on the retention commitment of an employee, which meant that low job stability was more than likely to contribute to high employee turnover rates (Ho 2006).
The consideration of security and economic costs directly influenced the effort commitment of an employee where the amount of economic compensation, pension benefits, medical allowance and other employee benefits determined the level of input they placed in their work duties.
The social interaction consideration had the greatest influence on the value commitment of an employee where the social relationships an employee is able to have in an organization determine the level of their commitment to the organization.
Properly identifying the intrinsic and extrinsic factors/work values that are possessed by each individual employee will contribute further to the proper understanding of how work values can be used to improve organizational performance.
Conclusion
This discussion has dealt with the concepts of work values and employee commitment within an organization and also how work values influence employee commitment to an organization. Various research work and studies have been conducted on whether work values affect employee commitment and this study has been able to refer to these works so as to build the discussion.
As noted in the study, most of the findings have demonstrated that work values have an effect or influence on employee commitment as they determine the level of motivation and job satisfaction and employee has towards their job.
Work values play an important role in determining the intrinsic and extrinsic work values possessed by an employee when performing their work duties. The study has therefore been able to ascertain that work values play a significant role in the commitment of an employee to an organization.
References
Hofstede, G., (2001) Culture’s consequences: comparing values, behaviours, institutions and organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications
Ho, C. C., (2006) A study of the relationships between work values, job involvement and organizational commitment among Taiwanese nurses. Published Thesis. Queensland, Australia: Queensland University of Technology
Levy, P. E., (2003) Industrial/organizational psychology: understanding the workplace. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin
Li, W., (2008) Demographic effects of work values and their management implications. Journal of Business Ethics, 81, pp 875-885
Matic, J. L., (2008) Cultural differences in employee work values and their implications for management. Management, Vol.13, No.2, pp 93-104
Muthuveloo, R., and Rose, R., (2005) Typology of organizational commitment. American Journal of Applied Science, Vol.2, No. 6, pp 1078-1081