Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
Employee commitment continues to be a major focus of inquiry given its predicative power on employee, and organisational, relevant outcomes ([44] Meyer et al. , 2002). In a traditional employer-employee relationship, employee perceptions of human resource (HR) practices of their employing organisation influence their commitment to the organisation ([37] Kinnie et al. , 2005), which, in turn, influences their organisational citizenship behaviour ([69] Van Dyne et al. , 1994; [12] Bowen and Ostroff, 2004). However, recent years have seen the emergence of new forms of employment relationship ([19] Coyle-Shapiro and Morrow, 2006; [21] Coyle-Shapiro et al. , 2006; [57] Rubery et al. , 2002), such as public private partnerships and particularly the retention of employment (RoE) Model within the public sector. Within this, whilst staff remain employees of the organisation, their management is transferred to a private sector third-party who is subsequently also involved in the recruitment and management of other employees for the public sector (nominal) employer. Such employee transfers represent a form of legal secondment to the private sector organisation ([51] Prowle, 2006).
Employee commitment in such atypical work arrangements has been subject to relatively limited theoretical and empirical investigation ([28] Gallagher and McLean Parks, 2001; [68] Van Breugel et al. , 2005; [70] Walsh and Deery, 2006). Whilst the transfer of employees' management to a management company inevitably entails change to the employment relationship, the extent to which employees' experiences and perceptions of the transfer influence their commitment to the management company is unclear. In addition, while the employing organisation remains the nominal employer, it is the management company that is directly responsible for day-to-day task allocation, monitoring, performance evaluation and feedback, and provision of training and support. This suggests that employees' commitment to the management company is also likely to impact upon their job performance.
This study begins to address this research gap by focusing upon two specific research questions, drawing upon data from a UK National Health Service (NHS) hospital that as part of a public private partnership had transferred employees' management using the RoE model:
RQ1 . To what extent are employees' perceptions of their treatment in the transfer process associated with the perceived organisational support from the management company?
RQ2 . To what extent does...