Role of Pay as Perceived Organizational Support Contributes to Employee's Organizational Commitment

AbstractThis study investigated the relationships among employees' pay and perceived organizational support (POS), employees' organizational commitment (OC) and employee turnover. The study conducted among 200 employees drawn from various five-star hotels shows that pay was positively, related to temporal change in POS, suggesting that it leads to POS. The next study establishes that POS is positively related to the OC. Similarly the third study establishes that POS facilitates a negative relationship between OC and voluntary employee turnover. These studies suggest that the pay identified with the organization contributes to POS and ultimately to OC and job retention.Keywords: Pay, Organizational Support, Employees' Organizational Commitment, Employee Performance, Employee Turnover, Five-star hotels.IntroductionEmployers commonly value employee dedication and loyalty. Employees who are emotionally committed to the organization show heightened performance, reduced absenteeism and a lessened likelihood of quitting their job. By contrast, employees are generally more concerned with the organization's commitment to them. Being valued by the organization can yield such benefits as approval and respect, pay and promotion and access to information and other forms of aid needed to better carry out one's job. The norm of reciprocity allows employees and employers to reconcile these distinctive orientations.Perceived Organizational SupportSupportive leader behaviors and a generally facilitative organizational climate may be subsumed under a variable entitled Perceived Organizational Support. Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison and Sowa2 demonstrated that individuals tend to form global beliefs concerning the extent to which the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being. Specifically, individuals evaluate the behavior of organizational agents towards them and infer the general motive underlying that treatment with the categories that are considered important varying considerably between organizations and between persons.Some individuals might base their sense of perceived organizational support (POS) upon such factors as the organization members' willingness to provide them with special assistance or special equipment in order to complete a project. Others might develop a strong sense of POS based upon the organization members' willingness to provide them with additional opportunities for training in an area that was of particular interest to them.Furthermore, employees are frequently sensitive to relevant environmental and organizational constraints that might limit the ability to provide them with desired rewards. Employees who experience a strong level of POS theoretically feel the need to reciprocate favorable organizational treatment with attitudes and behaviors that in turn benefit the organization. In support of this social exchange perspective, research has revealed that POS is positively related to job attendance and measures of job performance.Employees' Organizational CommitmentOrganizational commitment in recent years has become an important concept in organizational research and in the understanding of employees' behavior in the workplace. It reflects the extent to which employees identify with an organization and are committed to its goals. Interest in organizational commitment has led to the development of several instruments to measure the construct. Morrow6 noted that there were some 25 concepts and measures related to commitment and Sutton and Harrison7 called for a moratorium on developing additional measures until existing ones could be further analyzed and tested. One of the major models of organizational commitment is that developed by Meyer and Allen5 which conceptualizes organizational commitment in terms of three distinct dimensions: affective, continuance and normative.PayAccording to John Martin4, Remuneration Management is about finding the most effective basis on which to pay the employees for the contribution they give for the growth of the organization. …