Employee Engagement and Organizational Commitment: Evidence from Jordan

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the two measurements of employee engagement (job engagement and organizational engagement) and organizational commitment measured by three key measurements which are: affective (emotional) commitment; continuance (maintenance) commitment; and normative commitment, that is in the context of Jordanian banking sector. This study uses a non-probability sampling technique specifically of quota and convenience sampling. A survey self-administrated questionnaire was distributed on a sample of 336 frontline employees of banks in Jordan. Our findings show that frontline employees who have high job engagement and organizational engagement will have high level of affective commitment and normative commitment. On the other hand, high employees' job engagement can meaningfully affect employees' continuance commitment. This study has made significant contributions to the knowledge academically and practically. It is expected to extend the knowledge of the relationship between employee engagement and organizational commitment, also through examining the impact of various measurements of employees and organizational engagement and commitment in Jordan as one of the developing countries. Explicitly, this study fills the gap in the literature of employees' engagement and commitment and their impact on organizational overall performance.JEC Classifications: M1, M12Keywords: employee engagement; organizational commitment; banking sector; JordanI. INTRODUCTIONEmployee engagement and employee-organizational commitments are critical organizational requirements as organizations face globalization and recovering from the global recession. Engagements at work, employee and organizational commitment have been areas of interest among many researchers and they have received huge recognitions among scholars and studies. Many researchers in their studies support the relationship between organizational performance and employees' engagement, for example, Simpson (2009) and Andrew and Sofian (2012).However, according to Saks (2006) most of what has been found about employee engagement was found in practitioner journals; it has its basis in practice rather than theoretical and empirical research. Consequently, there is real need for more studies on employee engagement literature (Saks 2006). In additional, several studies in western developed economies show that there is a affirmative relationship between employee engagement and affective emotional commitment (Richardsen et al., 2006; Llorens et al., 2006; Hakanen et al., 2006; Saks, 2006; Demerouti et al., 2001; Maslach et al., 2001; Brown and Leigh, 1996), but none has looked at engagement's impact on the two other measurements of commitment: continuance and normative. Moreover, to date researchers have not yet studied the relationship between employee engagement and organizational commitment in the banking sector in Jordan. Furthermore, very few commitment studies were conducted in Jordan. Supporting this argument, Suliman and Iles (2000) argue that research in commitment in Arab literature has been somewhat ignored.Hence, this study is critical for the following reasons. First, this study contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between two measurements of employee engagement and three measurements of organizational commitment. Second, this study is considered one of the very few researches that examined employee engagement using two dimensions namely job engagement and organisational engagement. Previous research has focused primarily on work commitment such as Richardsen et al. (2006), Llorens et al. (2006), Hakanen et al. (2006), and Demerouti et al. (2001). Moreover, only one study was found that studied the two measurements of employee engagement: job engagement and organizational engagement according to Sake (2006).Therefore, this study expands the awareness of the impact of employee engagement on organizational commitment among frontline employees. …

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