Psychological Empowerment as a Predictor of Affective Commitment Among Employees of Indian BanksPsychological Empowerment as a Predictor of Affective Commitment Among Employees of Indian Banks

Neha Gahlawat
Assistant Professor, Department of Human Resources, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE-A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India; and is the corresponding author. E-mail: nehag@ibsindia.org

Sandeep Kumar
Assistant Professor, Department of Management, Dayanand College, Hisar 125001, Haryana, India. E-mail: sandeephsb10@gmail.com

The study is an attempt to examine the mechanism of enhancing affective commitment by understanding the effects of psychological empowerment on employees' commitment. The respondents included 208 employees from the Indian banking sector, and the regression results confirm a positive relationship between psychological empowerment and affective commitment. On the theoretical front, the study adds to the limited literature on psychological empowerment in the Indian context. On the practical side, the study helps organizations to understand the importance of psychological empowerment among employees to improve their affective commitment. Bank managers should focus on minimizing the elements present in the work environment that might create a feeling of helplessness in employees. They should create a working environment in the organization where employees are encouraged to take part in the decision-making process.

Introduction

A highly dedicated and committed workforce is essential for achieving organizational goals. Several studies have revealed the numerous benefits of affective commitment of employees to the organization. Commitment binds the employees to their organization and makes them more inclined to stay with the organization (Dewettinck and Ameijde, 2011). Affectively committed workforce feels a sense of pride in being members of the organization (Kehoe and Wright, 2013). Affective commitment develops a sense of organizational citizenship behavior among employees and enhances their level of job performance (Cobbinah et al., 2020). Affective commitment among employees makes them more dedicated to contribute in enhancing the performance of the organization (Hadziahmetoviae and Dinc, 2017). Because of these valuable outcomes of affective commitment, organizations feel a strong need to make employees more committed. This study is an effort to understand the mechanism of enhancing affective commitment by understanding the effect of psychological empowerment on employees' commitment. Although some studies have revealed that psychological empowerment is crucial for enhancing affective commitment among employees, this relationship has not been much researched in the context of the Indian banks. Indian banking sector has emerged as one of major employment-generating sectors in India (Setia and Singh, 2014). But on flipside, the banks, especially the private sector banks, face high attrition rate of employees (Gowthaman, 2020). Besides, there is constant pressure on the management to reduce costs and increase productivity, which is possible only through a committed workforce. Thus, banks are in grim need to develop a mechanism to build affective commitment among employees. Thus, this study is an effort to fill this gap by exploring the psychological empowerment-affective commitment relationship in the context of banking employees in India.

Theoretical Background and Hypotheses Formulation
Psychological Empowerment
Two approaches of employee empowerment have emerged from the literature, namely, structural empowerment and psychological empowerment. While structural empowerment deals with the efforts of organization to provide more autonomy to employees, psychological empowerment deals with the mental state of employees. Spreitzer (1995) described psychological empowerment as a motivational construct with four dimensions - meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Combination of these four cognitions reflects an active rather than passive orientation of an employee towards his or her work role (Spreitzer, 1995).

Affective Commitment
Commitment has been categorized into three dimensions, namely, affective, normative, and continuance commitment. Affective commitment refers to the emotional attachment of the employee with the organization. Employee stays with his/her organization because he/she wants to. Normative commitment refers to individual sense of obligation to remain with the organization. Continuance commitment refers to the sense of boundness of employee to remain with the organization because of the cost associated with leaving the organization. Normative and continuance commitment have been found to have no or little effect on positive outcomes, while affective commitment has been found to be a strong predictor of positive personal and organizational outcomes (Wasti, 2002; and Bhatnagar, 2005). Considering this, affective commitment has been taken in this study as an outcome of psychological empowerment.

Psychological Empowerment and Affective Commitment
Psychological empowerment and affective commitment are highly associated with each other because both are created through perceptual experiences of employees in their work environment (Spreitzer, 1996). Several empirical studies have confirmed their relationship. In a study of Indian IT executives, Jha (2011) found that psychological empowerment is very effective in enhancing affective commitment among employees. Albrecht and Andretta (2011) revealed that psychological empowerment can make employees more committed to the organization indirectly by making them more engaged with their work. Humborstad and Perry (2011) found in the Chinese context that employee empowerment reduces turnover intention among hotels frontline service workers by enhancing affective commitment among them. Bhatnagar's (2007) study of Indian managers has revealed that psychological empowerment makes positive impact on organizational commitment. Another study of Bhatnagar (2005) has demonstrated that the effect of psychological empowerment is stronger on affective commitment than normative and continuance commitment. Liden et al. (2000) argued that a sense of meaning in the job makes an employee more affectively committed to the organization. Some recent studies are also advocating the need for psychological empowerment to enhance affective commitment among the employees. Yousaf and UlHadi (2020) revealed that psychological empowerment induced through authentic leadership is very effective in making employees affectively committed. Based on this empirical evidence, the following hypothesis is proposed:

Psychological empowerment has positive effect on affective commitment among the Indian banking employees.

Data and Methodology
Lower-level banking employees were chosen as sample for the study. A structured questionnaire was administered to 300 employees working in various banks in India. Out of them, 250 employees returned the filled questionnaires. When questionnaires were screened, 42 questionnaires were found unusable because of incomplete information. Finally, 208 questionnaires were found appropriate for the study and used for further analysis, resulting in effective response of 69.33%. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett's test of sphericity assured about the adequacy of the sample. Basic information of the respondents is provided in Table 1. A majority of the respondents (90.4%) were males. More than half of the respondents (51%) are in the age group of 26 to 30 years. Average age of the respondents is 31.99 years. A majority of the employees (62.5%) are having below 5 years of work experience. Considering the education level of the respondents, 62.5% of respondents are undergraduates, while 37.5% of the respondents are postgraduates.

Instruments
Psychological Empowerment
Psychological empowerment of employees was assessed by using Spreitzer's (1995) 12- item construct. The scale measured four dimensions of psychological empowerment,

with three variables for each dimension. These four dimensions were: meaning (e.g., "My work is crucial for me"), competence (e.g., "I am self-assured about my capability to perform my job"), self-determination (e.g., "I have substantial independence and freedom in how I do my job") and impact (e.g., "I have huge impact on what happens in my department"). Higher scores indicated higher level of empowerment experienced by employees. Individual items, factor loadings, and Cronbach's alpha values are given in Table 2.

Affective Commitment
For measuring affective commitment, a 6-item scale was adopted from the organizational commitment scale developed by Allen and Meyer (1990). The respondents were asked to rate their level of affective commitment on a scale ranging from 1 to 5 (strongly disagree to strongly agree). Higher score indicated higher level of affective commitment among the employees. Details of the items, factor loadings, and Cronbach's alpha values are given in Table 3.

Control Variables
Previous studies have revealed that some demographic factors like gender, age, and work experience of employees affect their level of affective commitment. Therefore, these three variables were included for possible statistical control in the present study. Gender was categorizes into two: 1 (male) and 0 (female). Age was classified into six categories: less than 25 years, 26-30 years, 31-40 years, 41-50 years, 51-60 years, and above sixty years. Work experience was measured as the actual working years of the employees in their present organization.

Results
Factor Analysis
Before testing the hypothetical relationships among study variables, all the factors were subjected to a principal component factor analysis with Varimax rotation with the criterion that factors having greater than 1.00 eigenvalue will be retained. To clearly state the factors, items having greater than 0.05 loadings were retained. Details of the results of factor analysis regarding psychological empowerment are given in Table 2. When all the variables of psychological empowerment were subjected to factor analysis, four factors were extracted with eigenvalues of 5.154, 1.011, 1.160, and 1.895, explaining 76.827 of the variance. All the four factors loaded significantly with three variables in each factor. Based on the original scale (Spreitzer, 1995), these factors were named as meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact respectively. Cronbach's alpha values for the subscales were 0.866, 0.715, 0.837, and 0.840 respectively and for full scale, it was 0.873. All the alpha values were higher than the suggested value of 0.70 (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994).

The results of factor analysis for affective commitment are presented in Table 3. When factor analysis was applied on all the six items of affective commitment, they emerged as a single factor with the eigenvalue of 3.918 explaining 65.297% of variance. All of the factor loadings were much higher than the criterion of 0.50. Cronbach's alpha for the scale was 0.891, greater than the recommended value of 0.70 (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994).

Correlation
Table 4 presents means, standard deviation, and correlation among study variables. Mean of psychological empowerment is 3.869, with standard deviation of 0.598, indicating high level of psychological empowerment among the bank employees. Mean value of affective commitment is 3.917, which indicates that employees feel affectively committed to their banks. In further analysis, correlations among study variables were analyzed. Gender, work experience, and education of the employees did not show any significant relation with psychological empowerment and affective commitment. Psychological empowerment was significantly related with affective commitment (r = 0.578***).

Regression
After assessing the correlation among study variables, the next step was to analyze the causal relationship among study variables. The results of the regression analysis are shown in Table 5. Model 1 was the base model where control variables were put against affective commitment. None of the demographic variables showed any significant relation with affective commitment.

In the second model, direct effect of psychological empowerment on affective commitment is shown. It is obvious from model 2 that psychological empowerment has positive and significant influence on affective commitment (? = 0.559, p ? 0.001). Thus, the study confirms that when employees feel high level of psychological empowerment, they exhibit more affective commitment towards the organization.

Conclusion
This study intended to explore the relationship of psychological empowerment with affective commitment by taking a sample of Indian banking employees. Consistent with previous Indian studies (e.g., Jha, 2011; and Bhatnagar, 2012), psychological empowerment has been found positively associated with affective commitment. Psychological empowerment may increase affective commitment of employees because it satisfies their primary needs of prestige, opportunity for self-expression, recognition, and sense of personal importance by providing them meaningful jobs and freedom to handle their jobs in their own way and improve competence (Spreitzer, 1995). The findings of the study reinforce the findings of Mir and Manzoor (2018) that psychological empowerment is very effective in generating affective commitment among Indian banking employees.

Implications of the Study: Many theoretical as well as practical implications emerge from the current study. At the theoretical level, the study contributes to the literature on psychological empowerment, as it is one of the rare studies which has measured the influence of psychological empowerment on affective commitment in the context of Indian banks. On the practical side, the study is of help to the organizations on the importance of psychological empowerment among employees to improve affective commitment among them. Bank managers should focus on minimizing the elements present in the work environment that might create a feeling of helplessness in employees. They should create a working environment in the organization where employees are encouraged to take part in decision making. Regarding the day-to-day working, employees must be provided complete autonomy to make decisions while discharging their duties.

Limitations and Future Scope: One major weakness of the study is its cross-sectional design, which does not allow for the assessment of cause-effect relationship. Future studies should confirm the psychological empowerment-affective commitment relationship by adopting longitudinal research design. Future research should also explore the relationship of other variables which are not included in this study but may have influence on affective commitment such as transformational leadership, empowering leadership, job satisfaction, etc. Some contextual factors can also be considered in future studies such as organizational size, hierarchical levels, nature of the ownership, and educational qualification of the employees.

References

1. Albrecht L S and Andretta M (2011), "The Influence of Empowering Leadership, Empowerment and Engagement on Affective Commitment and Turnover Intentions in Community Health Service Workers", Leadership in Health Services, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 228-237.
2. Allen N J and Meyer J P (1990), "The Measurement and Antecedents of Affective, Continuance and Normative Commitment to the Organization", Journal of Occupational Psychology, Vol. 63, No. 1, pp. 8-18.
3. Bhatnagar J (2005), "The Power of Psychological Empowerment as an Antecedent to Organizational Commitment in Indian Managers", Human Resource Development International, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 419-433.
4. Bhatnagar J (2007), "Predictors of Organizational Commitment in India: Strategic HR Roles, Organizational Learning Capability and Psychological Empowerment", The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 18, No. 10, pp. 1782-1811.
5. Bhatnagar J (2012), "Management of Innovation: Role of Psychological Empowerment, Work Engagement and Turnover Intention in the Indian Context", The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 928-951.
6. Cobbinah E, Ntarmah A H, Obeng A F and Quansah P E (2020), "Organizational Commitment and Job Performance: Examining the Mediating and Moderating Roles of Organizational Citizenship Behaviour and Leadership Styles", International Journal of Human Resource Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 93124-93124.
7. Dewettinick K and Ameijde M V (2011), "Linking Leadership Empowerment Behavior to Employee Attitudes and Behavior Intentions: Testing the Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment", Personnel Review, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 284-305.
8. Gowthaman A (2020),"Recent Trends in Employee Retention and Attrition Rate in the New Generation Private Banks in India", Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 5167-5181.
9. Hadziahmetoviae N and Dinc M S (2017), "The Mediating Role of Affective Commitment in the Organizational Rewards-Organizational Performance Relationship", International Journal of Human Resource Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 105-130.
10. Humborstad S I W and Perry C (2011), "Employee Empowerment, Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment: An In-Depth Empirical Investigation", Chinese Management Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325-344.
11. Jha S (2011), "Influence of Psychological Empowerment on Affective, Normative and Continuance Commitment: A Study in the Indian IT Industry", Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 263-282.
12. Kehoe R R and Wright P M (2013), "The Impact of High-Performance Human Resource Practices on Employees Attitudes and Behaviours", Journal of Management, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 366-391.
13. Liden R C, Wayne S J and Sparrowe R T (2000), "An Examination of the Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment on the Relations Between the Job, Interpersonal Relationships and Work Outcomes", Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 85, No. 3, pp. 407-416.
14. Mir R A and Manzoor S (2018), "Psychological Empowerment Effects on Employee Affective Commitment and Behavioural Intentions", Pacific Business Review International, Vol. 10, No. 9, pp. 174-181.
15. Nunnally J C and Bernstein I H (1994), Psychometric Theory, 3rd Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York.
16. Setia M and Singh D (2014), "Employee Retention: A Challenge Faced by Indian Banking Industry", International Journal of Current Research, Vol. 6, No. 11, pp. 9856-9860.
17. Spreitzer G M (1995), "Psychological Empowerment in the Workplace: Dimensions, Measurement and validation", Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38, No. 5, pp. 1442-1465.
18. Spreitzer G M (1996), "Social Structural Characteristics of Psychological Empowerment", Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 483-504.
19. Wasti S A (2002), "Affective and Continuance Commitment to the Organization: Test of an Integrated Model in the Turkish Context", International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 26, No. 5, pp. 525-550.
20. Yousaf A and Ul Hadi N (2020), "Effect of Psychological Empowerment on Authentic Leadership and Affective Commitment Relationship", Journal of Managerial Sciences, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 109-126.