Introduction
Employees are among the vital resources of an organization and with developed industries and specific services, excellent skills are needed, particularly during the period when the human resource market has become very competitive because of globalization. Employees’ engagement to their organizations affects their performance and that of an organization. Employee engagement refersto the extent to which an employee is concernedabout his/her job and his/her loyalty to an organization (Abu-Shamaa, Al-Rabayah, & Khasawneh, 2015). Job satisfaction is the degree of contentment workers feel towards their jobs, and it is developed by various factors, such as availability of resources, teamwork, supervisors’ follow up, and personal attitudes. Due to many challenges facing organizations currently, it is significant to evaluate and stipulate factors that enhance commitment of employees to their organizations. Highly dynamic work environments put pressure on companies to maintain their positions and improve their performance over their competitors. Therefore, employees are regarded to be a competitive advantage for the success of an organization. Companies are focusing on factors that enhance their employees’ job satisfaction and engagement. This paper discusses the relationship between employees’ job satisfaction and engagement and their effect on organizational commitment (Abraham, 2012).
Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction refers to the manner in which employees perceive their work and the extent to which they like it. The more the work environment cares for employees’ needs and values, the more they are satisfied with their work. Researches have revealed the significance of job satisfaction and its function in employee engagement. There is a direct relation between job contentmentlevel and the degree of self-determination. Employee job contentment and commitment are highly related to anorganization’s outcomes. Therefore, job satisfaction is aprecursor of engagement(Abraham, 2012).
Various factors affect employee job satisfaction. They include work environment professional status, interaction, and autonomy. The factors that affect both job satisfaction and work engagement include the nature of work, acknowledgement of employees’efforts, teamwork, cooperation among departments, comparative benefits, and equal and appropriate administration of company policies(Rayton & Yalabik, 2014).
Job satisfaction is among the elementsthat make employees to feel engaged. Other elements of employee engagement are motivation and effectiveness. Therefore, Job satisfaction, feeling valued at work, effective communication, and training and development are key influences on workforce engagement and general satisfaction at work(Cook, 2008).
Job satisfaction can be classified into four categories: environmental factors, strategic employee recognition factors, individual factors, and psychological wellbeing factors. Environmental factors entail communication load and managers-staff communication. Strategic employee recognition factors encompass concerns of financial aspects and culture and workplace society, and the way these factors affect satisfaction. Individual factors comprise emotion and moods of employees, their genetic and characteristics, such as being able to work with teams or individuals and solving problems, and personality like estrangement and locus of control. Psychologicalwelfare factors are associated withkeyelements of employees’ life: job, family, and society (Mróz, & Kaleta, 2016).
Job satisfaction studies have fundamental practical inferences. Therefore, it is essential to establish more supportive features for employees to experience elective functioning, competency, and belongingness. In addition, job satisfaction can be attained by considering social- contextual and personal characteristics of employees. Organizations need to target workplace factors and increase job resources to enhance engagement. Moreover, changing management practices may promote employee satisfaction and hence develop business-unit outcomes as well as profit(Hays, & Lou, 2015).
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement refers to the level to which employees feel involved, contented with, and emotionally connected to enhance productivity, innovation, and retention. Employees who are engaged in their work are more valuing, enjoy and pride in their work, put much effort in their work, and are ready to share information with other workers to assist one another and the organization to succeed. They are also committed to their work, work in a company for a longer period, are productive, offer better customer service, and provide high profits in an organization. Engaged employees put in extra time to execute a task well, not for financial benefit but out of a personal sense of commitment called discretionary effort (Jha & Kumar, 2016). In a highly dynamic environment where organizations should be proactive to compete effectively, employees work engagement has become an important role in organizational effectiveness. Companies prefer employing loyal and committed workforce who is able to dedicate their full abilities to work. Organizations select employees who are ready to dedicate all their capabilities and experience to their organization. They require employees who are engaged with their job because engaged employees are more creative and productive.Additionally, engagement is related to three psychological conditions: meaningfulness (worth wellness and the value of people’s efforts, Safety (comfort of individuals while working) and availability (accessibility of physical and psychological resources in work). Employees are believed to beengaged when they are concerned with, passionate about, and contented with their job (Biswas & Bhatnagar, 2013).
Several researches indicate that work engagement is important in attaining positive results, such as job involvement, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction.In contrast, work disengagement is a situation where members of an organization uncouple from work errands. In addition, the employees withdraw and defend themselves physically, cognitively, or emotionally during role performances(Štěpánková, Bendová & Koralov, 2015). Disengagement may emerge because of employees’ emotional labor anddisagreementamong employees’ felt emotion and the organizational desired emotion. Broken systems also result in disengagement whereby companies fail to match people with the best-fit position, which creates severe consequences of employee disengagement. Additionally, employees become depressed, confused and job performance is retreated, resulting in high turnover(Cook, 2008).
Work environment has a significant function in work disengagement where more ambiguous, unpredictable and threatening environments are likely to disengage employees. Managers need to consider physical, emotional, and cognitive factors of work environment to establish an enthusiastic workplace that promotes employees’ engagement in work. Physical aspects entail physical effort exerted by employees to complete their duties. Additionally, physical aspects can also be associated with available job resources like workmates and supervisor’s support, performance feedback, and learning opportunity. The cognitive aspect is about employees’beliefsconcerningan organization, its leaders, and the working condition. Cognitive conductsintegrate workforcethought, attitudes, morals, and individual relations to form and strengthen their relationships. In a case where supportive connection and trusted relationship between employees result in psychological safety, cognitive-based trust may form a reliable and dependable relation between employees(Jha & Kumar, 2016).
Finally, the emotional aspect is concerned with whether employees have positive or negative attitudes towardsan organization and its leaders. Positive emotions provide a feeling of happiness, joy, and enthusiasm. In addition, the staffs experience improved health, increase their productivity, employ their skills and abilities, and motivate others to perform well(Hermsen & Vicki, 2008).
Factors Affecting Employee Engagement
Managersconcentrate on enhancing employees’ performance, which can be attained by focusing on employee engagement. Workforce psychological ability refers to employees’ belief that they have physical, emotional, or cognitive resources to engage themselves at work(Forck, 2014). The following factors influence employee engagement:
Resources
Many jobs require investing in physical, emotional, and cognitiveresources to facilitate employees’ responsibilities and work. Supportive resources result in greater availability and engagement(Karumuri, 2016).
Supervisor Relations
Positive-oriented relations like listening to employees’ concerns, motivating them, growing their skills, and handling work related challenges promote employees’ self-determination and affect their interest in work. In addition, positive superior relations result in feelings of psychological safety.
Coworker Relations
Socialinteraction with coworkers formsa greater meaning in work environment. People acquire meaning from the social identities they obtain from groups’ memberships. Moreover, interactions promote a sense of belonging and social identity. Fulfilling coworker interactions arehighly related to psychological wellbeing, which encourages commitment(Forck, 2014).
Work-Role Fit
Fitting workers’ self-concepts to their role promotes a sense of meaning where individuals enjoying work conduct themselves in a way that expresses authentic self-concepts. Work-role fit has an important impact on psychological meaningfulness.
The Effect Of Employee Job Satisfaction And Engagement On Organizational Commitment
Organizational commitment refers to the psychological strength of organizational employees or the amount of involvement employees have in their work. Organizational commitment improves employees’ loyalty and motivates them to devote themselves to an organization to enhance their productivity.Studies have indicated that intangible variables like work engagement and job satisfaction strongly impact organizational commitment(Rigg, Day & Adler, 2013). Engaging employees to their work represents the first step towards establishing a committed organizational environment where employees are motivated to work hard. There is a significant positive relationship between efficient organizational commitment and employee engagement, whereby happiness and work engagement have predictive value for effectual organizational commitment. In most cases, employees link their work engagement with organizational commitment and their objective of remaining in the organization. In addition, supervisors play an important function in promoting employee engagement and attaining a higher level of organizational commitment. They motivate employees by assisting them to see a wider context and connect to a broader concept. This process results in a better employee engagement, which promotes organizational commitment(Abu-Shamaa, Al-Rabayah, & Khasawneh, 2015).
The elements of organizational commitment include affective, continuance, and normative. Affective commitment explains emotional attachment of employees and their sense of belonging and being proud members of an organization. Continuance commitment means the aspiration to continue working in an organization while normative commitment is the innersense of obligation to an organization. It is important for leaders to understand that positive organizational collaboration encouragesworkers to work hard. In addition, consistency between employees’ personal values and organizational values enhances greater meaningfulness and psychological safety, which increases the chances of employee engagement and empowers employees. Additionally,compensationsarealso the strongest predictors of organizational commitment.Nevertheless, the strongest determinant of organizational commitment is the social relation between managers and staff. Employee trainingalso increases their commitment to an organization(Abu-Shamaa, Al-Rabayah, & Khasawneh, 2015). The findings of various studies have assisted managers to come up with effective decisions by offering the following recommendationsfordeveloping organizational commitment
- Enhancing communication activities
- Establishing compensationsystems likerewards, benefits, long service and good performance awards programs.
- Creating organizational culture
- Enhancing team-building activities
Job satisfaction plays an important function in organizational commitment, which indicates that employee engagement can be developed through satisfied employees, thus promoting higher productivity in organizations. Additionally, managers and human resource experts need to consider the relationship between happiness and work engagement, which results in higher job satisfaction and higher opportunities for organizational commitment. When employees are satisfied with their jobs, they become engaged in their work and they commit themselves to the organization. This increases employees and organizations’ productivity. It is also important to use appraisal systems to inspire employees to commit themselves to an organization by creating a sense of belonging(Hermsen & Vicki, 2008).
It is important to note that managers can strongly influence organizational commitment whereby the leadership style can influence employees’ organizational commitment. In addition, job satisfaction and organization commitment can be utilized as performance measurement of employees’ outcome. Therefore, it is necessary and significant to get committed employees to obtain a competitive advantage in a highly dynamic work environment. Committed employees dedicate all the abilities and knowledge to their organization and are more productive(Karumuri, 2016).
Employee engagement considers employees’ emotional commitment to theirwork and their willingness to give the best in attaining organizational objectives. On the other hand, job satisfaction mainly involves employees’ feelings about their work. Therefore, job satisfaction has a strong positive effect on organizational outcomes and work engagement. They have been utilized as nonfinancial metrics to measure business process efficiency and organizational outcomes(Popović, Maletić, & Paunović, 2015).
Employees’ performance is strongly associated with organizational commitment, which is considered the loyalty level of employees towards their organization and the extent they are ready to go to attain its objectives. Organizationalcommitment is affected by various factors, which include external factors, global tease, personal factors, and internal factors. Moreover, improvement of communication activities, construction of effectual compensation schemes, establishment of good organizational culture, and improvement of team-building activities are ways through which decision makers can enhance employees’ organizationalengagement(Abu-Shamaa, Al-Rabayah, & Khasawneh, 2015).
Reflections
In the current competitive environment, employees’ level of engagement and their quality of work are significant to the growth of an organization. Therefore, managers usually focus on identifying ways of boosting morale, increasing productivity, and gaining competitive advantage. Organizations with engaged employees increase their operating income by a high percentage. Additionally, they experience increased workforce output, reduced employee turnover, increased likelihoods of enticingexperts, and higherprofits to investors.
Therefore, it is clear that employee job satisfaction and work engagement are significant in enhancing their commitment to an organization. Companies have put in efforts to improve communication activities, establish organizational culture, support team-building activities, and boost personal development to enhance employees’ satisfaction and commitment.
Recommendations
Training, welfare, and salary have no influence on employee engagement. Therefore, an organization’s management should give importance to employee development and employee wellbeing to improve job satisfaction.
Short-term training programs that increase the skill level, new work methods should be offered to the middle age group employees facing career plateau challenges to encourage them continue working.
The basic pay should be revised according to the complexity of jobs to enhance a sense of pride to employees. This will make them feel valued by the organization.
Organizations should encourage two-way communication between superiors and junior employees through regular meetings to clear all misunderstandings in the workplace. The meetings can also assist in clarifying important values and goals of the organization.
Superiors should use performance feedback sessions to recognize the achievements of the subordinates to enhance their feeling of engagement. This will also assist in strengthening the relations between the superior and the subordinate during work.
The superiors should be supportive to recognize and guide their juniors at workplace.
Company policies should be well written and implemented without bias to promote employee engagement
Employees should be provided with challenging jobs to enable them maximize the unused potential, which creates a sense of satisfaction and results in employee engagement.
Conclusion
Engaged employees perform well in their jobs. Additionally, the study has indicatedthat factors like job benefits, recognition, cooperation, fair treatment, sound company policies,team spirit, and performance management system can promote job satisfaction in employees, which results in their engagement. Therefore, companies need to focus on improving the working conditions and offering employees the tools and resources needed to carry out their duties. In addition, continuous reviews and feedback from supervisors to employees are significant in enriching satisfactory outcomes.
Furthermore, work engagement needs better communication and a different look into human resource management to have better engaged employees. Supervisors are supposed to ensure that employees are aware of organization’s values and goals, and the human resource managers need to ensure that they hire employees who like their jobs. It is important to note that commitment is an imperceptible value that has several factors, which are also imperceptible. Nevertheless, commitment is an aspect of Jordanian employees who usually have strong feelings towards their organizations. Therefore, engagement levels can be maintained and enhanced when the management takes care of employee participation in developmental activities and monetary benefits.
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