Praveena Thevisuthan
Abstract
The study aims to identify the level of job involvement of non- managerial employees working at the Ceylon Electricity Board in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. A total of 100 questionnaires were issued to such employees but only 92 were answered and made available for analysis. As per analysis, it was found that there was a moderate level of job involvement among non- managerial employees. Thus the findings provide more insight into the ways for increasing the job involvement at the workplace. Future researches may look in to subject with different constructs and in various contexts.
Key words: Job Satisfaction, Job Engagement, Non- Managerial Employees.
- Introduction
Job involvement is also considered as an important behavioral aspect since it directly links to a person’s working life and is favourably associated with the aspects of the job (Kanungo, 1982). Job involvement is considered as the favorable organizational implications which support to achieve the organizational goals and lead to enhance efficiency and productivity (Brown, 1996). Job involvement is considered as an important employee attitude since it enhances the desired behaviors including job satisfaction and positive motivation (Schultz & Schultz, 1994). Also Robbins and Judge (2009) stated that employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do.
Job involvement refers to how people perceive their jobs in relation to the working environment, the job itself, and how their work and life are integrated (Hirchfeld & Field, 2000). McGregor (1960) saw that job involvement leads to enhanced productivity and to create work situations which lead to better integration of individual and organizational goals. Providing more challenging and demanding jobs to the employees leads to increased productivity in the organizations. Moreover job involvement leads to an individual’s satisfaction while increasing the organizational productivity (McGregor, 1960).
Even though, the construct of the job involvement is generally tested in many previous studies, still there is a research gap in applying this construct to the developing nations, especially studying job involvement among non- managerial employees. It is against this backdrop that the present research aims to identify the level of job involvement among non-managerial employees of Ceylon Electricity Board, Sri Lanka.
- Research Methodology
2.1 Research Approach
The positivist and interpretivist approaches were adopted for the current study in addition to deductive approach.
2.2 Sample for the study
For the study, 100 non-managerial employees of the Ceylon Electricity Board in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka were selected using stratified sampling method.
2.3 Research Instrument and Data Collection
The researcher adopted standard research instrument for the Job Involvement, developed by Kanungo (1982) which consists of 10 items. These items were measured on a five-point Likert scale (1= strongly disagree, 5= strongly agree). Thus, a structured questionnaire was used as a data collection method.
2.4 Method of Data Analysis
The study used descriptive analysis where it used mean and standard deviation to analyse the research data.
- Results and Discussion
The data were analysed through SPSS version 24.0.
As per Table 1, the non-managerial employees perceived a moderate level of job involvement with the mean value and standard deviation 3.39 and 0.716 respectively.
As per analysed data, 03 items of job involvement were discovered as high level. Amongst those items, the item of “Most of my personal life goals are job-oriented” showed the higher level of involvement with the mean vale of 3.85. The items of “I have very strong ties with my present job that would be very difficult to break” and “Most of my interests are centered upon my job” also reached its high level of mean values (3.64 and 3.58).
However, 07 out of 10 items of job involvement showed the moderate level of values. E.g. “Usually, I feel detached from my job” showed a mean value of 3.48 and “I like to be absorbed in my job most of the time” recorded a mean value of 2.98.
One of the researches found that job involvement of part time employees or contractual employees showed lower level of involvement than full time employees at the workplace (Martin & Hafer, 1995). This is an encouraging pointer to the organizations to enhance involvement, since it has a huge effect on other variables such as job commitment, organizational performance etc.
Further, job involvement involves the internalization of values about the goodness of work or the importance of work in the worth of the individual (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965). As such individuals who display high involvement in their jobs consider their work to be a very important part of their lives and whether or not they feel good about themselves is closely related to how they perform on their jobs
Therefore, job involvement can be increased through the role of work and job design (Lawler,1992 and Pfeffer,1994).
- Conclusion and Recommendations
The study concludes that there was moderate level of job involvement among non- managerial level employees of the Ceylon Electricity Board, Eastern Province, Sri Lanka.
Since the job involvement is the cornerstone of all individual and organizational performance, the job involvement of non- managerial employees need to be increased through proper human resource management practices, such as providing proper role of work, effective and acceptable job design, ensuring autonomy, and flexibility and empowering at the workplace. Moreover, the organization can enhance the dimensions of job satisfaction including pay and benefit, supervision, the job itself, working conditions etc.
References:
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Kanungo, R. N. (1982). Measurement of job and work involvement. Journal of Applied Psychology. 67(3), 341-349.
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Lodahl T. M. & Kejner M. (1965). The definition and measurement of job involvement. Journal of Applied Psychology, 49, 24-33.
Martin,T.N. & Hafer, J.C. (1995). “The multiplicative interaction effects of job involvement and organizational commitment on turnover intentions of full-and- part time employees”, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 44, 310-331.
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