Relationship between Employee Engagement and Organizational Commitment A Qualitative Analysis

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Dr. Anuradha Chavali, T. Thirumal Reddy

Abstract

With the dawn of technological progression, the Telecom Sector in India has been reckoned to be the fastest evolving one, thanks to the onset of the forces of globalization and liberalization. The telecommunications industry in India ranks among the world as the third largest network, not to forget that it is positioned to be the second in Asia. There is an ever increasing competition attributed to lessened tariffs as well as procedural liberalization, thus attracting new entrants. All this has led to a prolific price based battle for elevating the success figures. All this has eventually hit the players hard because of downward drift of revenues. One of the after effect of this has been the high rate of attrition among the employees working in telecom industry.
And one of the determinant for cutting across this competition is the existence of highly engaged and committed workforce ( Agarwal and Bhargava, 2013). With the proliferation of organizations that are more knowledge intensive, a lot of importance has been attributed to the human resources that bring about a fit between the internal and external environment of the organization and contribute to development and sustainability (Arokiasamy,2009). Since, people are the vital assets of any organization, as is the case with the telecom sector as well, there is a need for continued improved of the same in terms of knowledge and skills and more importantly the psychological attachment with the organisation(Rastogi, 2013). Contrary to this proposition, disengaged employees lack commitment and thus there is a rise in the rate of attrition, lowered productivity, more number of accident and wastages all of them attributing to cost diseconomies (Abidin et al;2010).
The research paper in question tries to probe into the association between employee engagement and the various dimensions of commitment like commitment towards the profession, commitment towards the team and that towards the organization that they work for so as to understand if it can provide any solution to employee turnover in telecom sector. The study makes use of a multi-method research design. Initially about 300 employees of different firms in telecom sector in Telangana were surveyed. Then a smaller sample suitable for this purpose was drawn. Employees working in the Telecom Industry from Telangana at various capacities were interviewed to find out the determinants of engagement and its relationship with commitment and its type. Similarly focused group discussions were carried out to have further clarity on the problem in question. A special mention needs to be made about the exit interview data that was used for better understanding. Upon transcribing the responses obtained, what was found was a profound influence of demographic factors like gender, marital status and organizational factors like continued experience in the same organization on their level of engagement. Surprisingly, no correlation could be established between the level of functioning and the engagement and commitment of any kind towards the organization. Further, the research findings demonstrate link between engagement and commitment in a positive direction.

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