Organizational Commitment: Job Satisfaction, Stress, Motivation

Today’s organization because of global competition and cost cutting had lead to great changes in the organizations leading to greater effect of organizational behaviors. Some organizations are losing employees to other organizations and some employees are losing their efficiency due to the lack of job satisfaction, or due to stress and/or due to lack of motivation, or combination of many factors. Colquitt et al has described various factor effecting employees and its organizations in organizational behaviors, 2nd edition. Controlling stress and self motivating is very important to achieve goals, and when goals are met moral is elevated.
Job satisfaction leads to organizational commitment and job performance. Almost every organization faces some kind of brain drain when an employee leaves the organization. Human resource management and managers have developed many strategies to understand employees and their problems, to improve organizational behaviors by providing trainings to employees related to organizational commitment and engagement, as organizational commitment leads to better job performance and job satisfaction, which leads to better quality of product or service, which leads to more customers and growth in revenue.
For an employee, job satisfaction may mean many things like good pay, frequent promotions, enjoyable coworkers, work, authority/status, moral cause, environment, etc (Colquitt et al. , 2010). An employee with high job satisfaction will have high positive feeling for the work and organization, and will have high motivation also. When an employee is motivated, attains job satisfaction consecutively performs better. Work related and non-work related stresses have an effect on organizational behavior. An employee has to control stress and reduce the strains caused by stress to take a better judgment and decisions.

Every generation has been demanding something from its people, with time people also became very challenging and people who thrived and succeeded had always been role models for many ambitious leaders. Today’s work place has became more challenging as business is no more concentrating to a small group of people or region, rather businesses are done more globally, across continents targeting wide variant of people. Today’s organizations are facing more competition, has to deliver more quality and quantity for less cost is putting its management and employees on the edge to provide demanding work.
Employees who are motivated work hard to meet the goals, when the goals are met their job satisfaction level increases. Last year I was working in a multinational company and their primary business was related to telecommunications and data hauling over optical fiber. Most of my projects and applications are supporting manufacturing and operations of the organizations, whose manufacturing was spread across mainly in USA, China and Thailand. Our team size was ten employees reporting to a manager. Every employee in the team was very happy, enjoyed the work, and took ownership of the project, worked with full commitment.
On an average, every employee in the team was with the company for at least 5 years. Senior most employees in the team was working with the same organization for 13 years and youngest was 2 years. Even though every employee was committed to their work, had job satisfaction in various factors, few employees were stressed out and had negative satisfaction with regards to unfair promotions. As few employees felt that the manager was biased and showing favoritism to one of the employee, demoralized employee who were with the company, team for longer time.
Even though every employee was very committed, showed high degree of job performance due to unfair promotions and due to lack of growth opportunity, it demoralized employees, forcing to either quit or underperform or just do the given job rather than deriving the best for the organization. What I noticed over the period is an employee who had stayed in the company for less than two years have high commitment, engagement, job satisfaction and moral anticipating that his work will be recognized some day and rewarded. In the case on employees who are more than two (2) and less than five (5) ears tend to lose their commitment, job satisfaction and moral as what they have anticipated never met or addressed.
In our case, as in my team for more than five to eight years there was no promotions neither growth track nor visibility. During that time, when the manager showed favoritism by providing high visible projects and tasks to one employee while demoralizing that others are not capable to do the task, had deeply wounded and demoralized team spirit and motivation. After dragging feet for a while few employees either left and few just underperformed and continued to work for various other reasons.
Few employees including me, confronted the manager and raised objection for not providing proper growth opportunity, as there was no improvement in the situation, unable to stay there at the same time, unable to underperform, I applied for different organizations and quit the company. For an employee job satisfaction can mean in many ways, for few high pay means job satisfaction, for few promotions and recognition, for few if their supervisor is polite and good, for few if their coworkers at work are friendly and helpful, for few if they like the work they do may bring job satisfaction (Colquitt et al. 010).
According the Job characteristics theory, variety, identity, significance, autonomy and feedback play a vital role in job satisfaction as in the new job workplace, when I ask senior most employees who are with the company for more than twenty five years, their response is similar opportunity to switch to different tasks after few years, identity and engagement, significance and importance of the work and employee, freedom and independence to perform work and finally feedback and employee appreciation from managers and customers.
It would be difficult to satisfy every factor to hundred percent but if every factor is addressed to a degree at least will lead to job satisfaction. The job responsibility puts an employee into stressful situation. If roles are conflicting or very ambiguous, it will lead into very stressful situation. If roles are conflicting, there can be a possibility of hurting the coworker and other team members, as in my case because of role conflict and ambiguity, confusion started among coworkers and ultimately the task was delayed and deliverables were delayed due to improper handling and uplication of work.
To avoid coworker misunderstandings roles has to be very well defined to avoid conflicts and ambiguity. Motivation is very important for anything, our team was very motivated, took ownership of every project, worked to resolve the issue and did not wait for direction. Freedom to perform the task and utilizing the available resources primarily motivated the team. The company provided convenient if necessary hundred percent tele-working facility, employee can work almost from home that motivated few more than anything.
Due to current recession, stable job motivates few employees and more pay sometimes satisfies and motivates. I like goal setting theory, as small goals will direct and drive to big goal. Working in IT for long time, I was able to complete entire project by breaking the project into small pieces and completing one piece at a time. Based on my experience, I think goal setting theory is the best and will provide step by step approach to the final goal.
Organization and managers have to work with employees to understand the emotions of the employee, understand strong points, and understand the weak areas of the employee. Every employee may not be an expert in all areas. It is the responsibility of manager to use the resources properly. If a manager doesn’t utilize the resources properly then it will create a role conflict and stress related to work and coworkers. Employees have to communicate with managers and open the dialog, express the issues.
Managers have to consider employees suggestions or issues and try to resolve the issues. It would be difficult to address all issues, but honest opinion and honest no is far better than political statements. Organizations have to provide required trainings and periodically conduct surveys to understand the trend of the employees thoughts and organizational commitment. Organization losing an employee is a lose for both employee and organization and not just for one.
Employee has to rebuild the trust in the new organization, learn the business and gain knowledge and for organization has to have to hire a new suitable employee and train the employee to perform the job. Organizational commitment is very important and to achieve high level of organizational commitment employee has to have high level of job satisfaction and job performance. High job performance will lead to good recognition. Good recognition will lead to high job satisfaction. As an employee’s keeps attaining recognition their motivation will be high to take more job responsibility.
Even though job satisfaction means many things to many employees, ultimately job satisfaction leads to job commitment. In the present world, due to recession employees are very demoralized because of many rounds of layoffs, outsourcing. HR and organizations are frequently conducting surveys and employee meetings to update the status of the company, which will help employees to open a dialogue and express their concerns to their managers. Managers have to provide an honest opinion and try to resolve the issue. Organization commitment is very important for organization and employee.