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Keywords Organizational cultures, Leadership, Job satisfaction
Abstract Investigates the relationships between employees' perceptions of organisational culture and subculture, and job satisfaction and commitment. Questionnaires containing the above measures were distributed to nurses employed in seven large hospitals and a total of 251 responses were obtained. Measures of leadership style and employee demographics were also included in the questionnaire. Regression analysis was used to investigate the extent to which nurses' job satisfaction and commitment to their wards are predicted by their perceptions of the hospitals' cultures (or organisational culture), the cultures of their wards (or organisation subculture), the leadership styles of their ward managers, and several demographic characteristics including age, experience, education and job tenure. It was found that ward culture was more predictive of commitment than was hospital culture. Also, statistically controlling for job satisfaction did not substantially reduce the influence on commitment of any of the independent variables included in this study. The results suggest that managers may need to focus more on organizational subcultures in generating greater commitment among employees.
The topic of organizational commitment has received a great deal of interest in the past decade and numerous studies have been directed at determining its causal antecedents (for example, Bateman and Strasser, 1984; DeCotiis and Summers, 1987; Iverson and Roy, 1994; Michaels, 1994; Mottaz, 1988; Williams and Hazer, 1986; Taormina, 1999; DeConinck and Bachman, 1994; Dodd-McCue and Wright, 1996; Russ and McNeilly, 1995; Clugston, 2000). The issue of commitment is particularly important for managers in organizations (Tushman and O'Reilly, 1997; Nadler, 1997; Limerick et aL, 1998). With the increasing speed and scale of change in organizations, managers are constantly seeking ways to generate greater employees' commitment and competitive advantage.
Commitment, which is the dependent variable in this study, has been the focus of extensive discussion and empirical investigation by many authors. A well-known model proposed by Allen and Meyer (1990) proposes that there are three components of organizational commitment, namely, affective, continuous and non-native. As defined by these authors, the affective component of organizational commitment refers to the employee's emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in, the organization. The continuance component refers to commitment based on the costs that the employee associates with leaving the organization. The normative component refers...