Employee Perception of HRM Practices: Impact on Commitment to the Organization

The highly competitive environment of today's business organizations underlines the importance of developing an efficient and productive work force and then retaining it. Research has identified various factors affecting employee retention and employee commitment which has emerged as a significant contributor towards an employee's decision to stay or leave an organization. Human Resource Management Practices (HRMPs) of an organization is an important post-entry variable that can affect the commitment of the employees towards their organization. The evidence in the literature suggests that it was not the human resource practices per se but the perceptions of the employees regarding those practices that actually affected their commitment to their workplace. The present study has attempted to investigate three dimensions of employees' perceptions, perceptions of fairness, perceptions of effectiveness, and perceptions of support (FES) of HRMPs of their organization and its relation with their Organisational Commitment (OC). The sample comprised of bank officers of private banks in the Lahore region. The descriptive statistics depicted a significant positive correlation between all three perceptions of HRMPs and OC while regression analyses showed that the perception of effectiveness of HRMPs was the most significant predictor of organizational commitment followed by the perception of support. INTRODUCTION The basic and underlying notion of Human Resource Management (HRM) is to attain a sustained competitive advantage through effective utilization of human resources. Most traditional resources such as capital, equipment and location are less significant as they can be acquired by anyone at a price, whereas, the acquisition of a ready pool of highly qualified and highly motivated personnel is rather difficult if not impossible. A committed and dedicated work force is a valuable asset that can hardly be duplicated or imitated by the competitors. Commitment has been considered a part of HRM literature since 1980s. This is as a result of Harvard scholars including it in the area of HRM and indicating the advantage it has given Japanese organizations when compared to the Western organizations. Commitment of the work force is an essential attribute for achieving the organizational effectiveness. According to Mowday et al. (1979), Organizational Commitment (OC) can be characterized by three factors: a strong belief of the employees in and the acceptance of organizational goals and values, employees' willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization and their strong desire to maintain membership in the organization. Meyer and Alien (1997) gave three dimensions to the concept of OC: (1) 'Affective' component that reflects an emotional bond between an employee and the organization which is based on the individual's identification with the organization. Work experience has shown to be the strongest and the most consistent link with the affective commitment. (2) A 'Continuance' component refers to the perceived cost of leaving an organization due to accumulated investment or 'side bets' in the organization. The employee's association does not go beyond the continuance of membership with the organization; and finally (3) A 'Normative' component that incorporates the notion of moral obligation. The employee feels obligated to remain with the organization either because of loyalty or through an obligation to reciprocate. In contrast with those who remain in the organization from a sense of duty or to avoid the cost of leaving, affectively committed individuals stay because they desire to Workplace commitment has been widely recognized as a major determinant of employee behaviour. Those who have higher commitment are employees who identify highly with the organizational goals, and are ready to exert more efforts on behalf of the organization. Researches show that employees who are more committed to the organization than those who are least committed demonstrate: * Organizational citizenship; they go the extra mile (Mowday et al, 1979). …