Organizational commitment and job satisfaction: creating and maintaining employee engagement

Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction

Creating and sustaining organizational commitment in employees needs to get beyond the short-term strategies managers and leaders often rely on to temporarily increase job satisfaction. The core aspects of job satisfaction on the part of employees that lead to long-term organizational commitment are predicated on creating opportunities for growth, job enrichment, enlargement and potential for professional growth (Humborstad, Perry, 2011). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how organizational commitment can strengthened over time by creating greater opportunity for personal and professional growth with employees, increasing their level and strength of organizational commitment in the process.

Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment

The consistency of job satisfaction strategies on the part of an organization and its managers have a direct effect on long-term organizational commitment of its employees (Rubin, Brody, 2011). The greater the level of affective commitment, or the psychological attachment to an organization, and normative commitment, or the perceived obligation to remain with an organization, the higher the likelihood an employee will make personal decisions based on their loyalty to a firm (Ruiz-Palomino, Ruiz-Amaya, Knorr, 2011). To achieve high levels of affective and normative commitment however, managers need to create a very solid, stable, predictable and most of all, trustworthy framework within which job satisfaction can be achieved (Humborstad, Perry, 2011). There are many factors involved in job design, management training, incentives, performance management and the daily approaches taken to create collaboration and communication between employees that contribute to job satisfaction. Of all of these however the most critical is providing a trustworthy foundation of personal and professional growth for employees (Humborstad, Perry, 2011).

The greatest job satisfaction occurs when there is a solid basis of autonomy, mastery and purpose within the design of any given job, and employees are urged to test the boundaries of their skills, abilities, talents and intelligence (Sanjuan, 2011). Transformational leaders have the ability to create exceptionally high levels of organizational commitment and intense level of loyalty because they give every employee the opportunity to have ownership not in just their jobs but the company as well (Rubin, Brody, 2011). Transformational leaders also create an exceptional level of candor, honesty and ultimately trust with their subordinates as well, with a clarity of ethics about job design and expectations being commonplace (Ruiz-Palomino, Ruiz-Amaya, Knorr, 2011).