Article summary-No strings attached?’: How attribution of disinterested support affects employee retention. Authors: Mignonac & Richebe
The article “No strings attached?: How attribution of disinterested support affects employee retention” is a presentation of research that mainly focused on finding out the employees’ attribution of disinterested organizational support that is the support seen by the employees as not coming from an underlying calculation, relates with retention of the employees in the organization. Disinterested support of the employees by the organization is a vital issue in human resource management as the main goal of human resource management is to ensure a good working relationship between the employees, management and their working environment. Finding out the effect of lack of support to the employees from the organizational on keeping of the employees will indicate the importance of the organizational supporting their employees in their daily activities to ensure that the employees remain happy and willing to continue serving the organization in the foreseeable future.
There were three research questions to be answered after completing carrying out this research. The first research question intended to find out whether perceived disinterested support related positively to affective and normative organizational support. Perceived organizational support is the experience based attribution that concerns kind intentions of the organization’s norms as they affect the employees. The second research question intended to find out if perceived disinterested support related negatively to turnover intention that is if it had no impact on the intentions of the employees to go for work in their organization. The third research question intended to find out if perceived disinterested support related negatively to the turnover behavior that is if it did not have any effects on the way the employees reported everyday to their working places in the organization.
The final data sample consisted of 151 participants from French business school who graduated between 1984 and 2004 with an average age of 32.5 years.They had been employed by their organization for an average period of 5.3 years and 53.7% were male while 46.7% were female. Their responses were provided on a five-point Likert Scale ranging from strongly disagree at 1 to strongly agree at 5.Perceived disinterested was measured by the use of a five-item scale that had been developed for the present study. Perceived organizational support was measured by the use of the eight-item short form of the POS survey. Affective and normative organizational commitment was measured by the use of the French version of organizational commitment scales developed by Bentein to measure Meyer and Allen’s commitment forms. Turnover intention was measured with a three-item scale. Turnover was measured at 15 months after T2 survey.
The structure of the data was examined by the use of confirmatory factor analysis. Hypotheses were tested by the use of hierarchical linear regression analysis. To test the mediation of the hypothesis, the four-step procedure recommended by Baron and Kenny. To assess the significance of indirect effects, the Sobel test was performed and a non-parametric bootstrapping procedure used to test the Sobel test results.
The study found out that employees are sensitive to various clues that contribute to reinforcement or weakening of the impact of the actual support of the organization on their job attitudes and behaviors. The research indicated apparent disinterestedness of the organization to be one of the main clues that need to be taken into account. This study therefore confirmed that perceived disinterested support related positively to affective and normative organizational support. It also confirmed that Perceived disinterested support relates negatively to turnover intention.
This article is interesting to me as it brings to light one of the main issues ignored in employee-organization relationship and how this affects the way employee feels towards the organization. The article is related to HRM course as HRM course intends to educate us on the importance of a good relationship between the organization and the employees; this article does the exact same thing. The case study can be helpful to managers of various organizations as they can use it to find areas where they have been faltering in creation of a good relationship between the organization and the employees and make the necessary corrections.
