New organizational parameters for developing job involvement: Performance feedback and organizational demography

Abstract

In today's increasingly competitive environment, the importance of retaining employees have resulted in the work force to have positive attitudes towards their jobs. There has been increasing interest in positive psychology within organizational research, which has resulted in the identification of the organizational parameters of these positive attitudes to be more pronounced. One of these parameters is "job involvement" is seen as the psychological contract between the worker and their organization. In both conceptual and empirical studies, compared to similar concepts like job satisfaction, organizational commitment and career commitment, job involvement is less researched within the literature. Looking from the individuals' scope, increasing the job involvement as well as the job satisfaction of the individuals has been seen as important needs of the industry which is needed to increase organizational effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. When variables such as those related to job loyalty are taken into account, one such variable that would portray performance feedback can be researched. Performance feedback, which was one of the dimensions of the job characteristics model developed by Oldham and Hackman (1974), could be defined as the information relating to how efficient the individual in successfully completing the task is. Performance feedback is very instructive in portraying the performance of the individual and it is also important in a sense that it is also a source of motivation that is intrinsic in nature to the individual as it shows how the individual might contribute to the organization. Performance feedback can be expressed in two sub-levels which are "individual doing the work" and "individuals". In the literature, factors relating to performance like organizational demography which could also impact job involvement have been less researched in comparison, which could be another good research question. In this study, the effects of performance feedback as a premise of job involvement and how the level of job involvement of employees becomes different by organizational demographics were examined. 253 employees from 8 companies which was selected from manufacturing and service sector was taken as a sample for this survey. Questionnaire method was used for data collection techniques. To diagnose hypothesis relations, correlation, t test, ANOVA, Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskall Wallis were used in this study. Six point likert scale was used for measurement. According to research findings, founded that performance feedback is related with the some factors of job involvement like self-respect, active participation to work, and value of work in life. Significant differences between levels of job involvement among participants in terms of age and organizational tenure are reported.