Public institutions implement national policies on behalf of the government and do their best within the legal boundaries for the nation's well-being and welfare. Apart from their arguments and wills, however, the government has recently introduced an...
Public institutions implement national policies on behalf of the government and do their best within the legal boundaries for the nation's well-being and welfare. Apart from their arguments and wills, however, the government has recently introduced an evaluation system applicable to public institutions of a certain size and started to demand more accomplishments and endless innovations from them in order to correct the social prejudice about their reckless management and inefficiency and to increase the nation's competitive edge.
Commissioned to do a job by the government or founded to serve public objectives based on legal grounds, public institutions are increasingly exposed to competition like private corporations. Both literature study and empirical study were conducted using the survey responses from 177 employees at five public institutions to examine the influences of job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Previous study reported that the more job satisfaction employees had in public institutions, the greater their organizational commitment was. This study generated some results that were significantly different from those of previous study and suggested some problems.
First, as for the factors affecting the members' job satisfaction, the job itself, colleagues, and supervisors turned out to have positive impacts on the employees' organizational commitment. But promotions and salaries, which were reported to have significant impacts in other studies, were not significant factors. That can be attributed to the salary and promotion system adopted by public institutions and the recent changes to the environment. The conventional seniority system and salary class that give more advantages to employees according to the working years no longer contribute to the organizational operation under the recent pressure of better performance. Employees working at public institutions can be motivated by clear definitions of their rights and responsibilities and a new reward system based on invested efforts and resulting performance.
Second, their relationships with the colleagues and supervisors had major influences on the employees' organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior in the public institutions. The public institutions should expand and support the members' formal and informal organizational activities and make efforts to create a positive organizational culture if they are to reinforce their organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior.
Third, the employees' voluntary participation can be induced more by personnel posting that understands the personality of the members and fits their individual aptitudes than uniform and one-sided personnel posting. And the human resources development strategies need to include the plans to reinforce the education and training chances for the employees to obtain new technologies and improve their performance and to present new visions to their individual futures.
Fourth, despite the fact that a job description had positive impacts on the employees' job satisfaction and organizational commitment, the ones used by the surveyed public institutions only described major tasks and were revised in halves according to the changes to the working environment. It's important to make up an accurate job description and specification through job analysis, to clearly define the rights and responsibilities for unit tasks, and to update the jobs by readily accepting changes to them.
Those measures will eventually increase the efficiency of the entire organization as well as that of personnel management.