Antecedents of organisatonal commitment among engineers at Tenaga Nasional Berhad

Abstract

Nowadays, the main challenge faced by organisations is to maintain their employees’ commitment in their current business environment. Some of the employees, especially skilled employees like engineers, are willingly changing jobs. This is often due to low organisational commitment. As such, this study examines antecedents of organisational commitment among engineers at Tenaga Nasional Berhad. The specific objectives of this study are: (1) to determine the types of commitment among engineers’ in the organisation, (2) to study the levels of engineers’ participation in organisational decision-making, (3) to find out the levels of engineers’ job satisfaction in the organisation, (4) to examine the levels of engineers’ job characteristics in the organisation, (5) to identify the levels of engineers’ religious commitment in the organisation and (6) to investigate the relationships between participative decision-making, job satisfaction, job characteristics and religious commitment with organisational commitment. Data were collected from 336 engineers from four regions in Peninsula Malaysia, namely North, South, East and West, using stratified random sampling procedure. These four regions were divided to represent four states which run three TNB’s core businesses, which are generation, transmission and distribution. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to answer the objectives and to test the hypotheses of the study. Five general hypotheses were developed based on the Social Exchange Theory. All of the hypotheses predicted that there are positive relationship between organisational commitment with participative decision-making, job satisfaction, job characteristics and religious commitment. The results show that all the independent variables were considered as among the factors that were related or contributed to organisational commitment. It was also found that although the levels of job satisfaction among the engineers were much lower than other independent variables, they still remained in the organisation. It was also found that religious commitment was positively related to normative commitment.