RELIGION AND MONEY: PREDICTORS OF EMPLOYEE COMMITMENT WITHIN THE HEALTH SECTOR

Employee workplace commitment is one of an imperative topic nowadays in the organizational studies. Religion and money are among the several antecedents of employee commitment in organizations. Employees’ religion and organizational monetary reward practices are of eagerly importance in an employee career. Organizations have been facing lack of commitment in their workforce because of less consideration on the monetary as well as spiritual aspects. A comparative analysis between these two antecedents will be helpful to find out the true aspect behind this shortfall in the health sector. This study aims to investigate the relationship between monetary reward practices and religious affiliation with employee commitment. Data was collected from 233 Muslim employees of the health sector of Pakistan and the correlation and regression analysis were done by SPSS. The findings interpret that monetary reward practices were found to be highly related to employee commitment and having more effective influence as compared to employee’s religious affiliation. The current study suggests the health sector of Pakistan to take an account in providing monetary benefits to the employees to strengthen their workplace commitment.


INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, there has been an increasing amount of literature on the employee workplace commitment in the organization behavioural studies. Employee commitment is an expectation of an employee's intention to stay or leave (Lee et al., 1992), which cannot be estimated since it is an abstract concept. Employees are only committed to their workplace if they have a satisfactory working environment. It can be a financial benefit in the form of money or non-financial such as, providence of employeefriendly work settings, recognizing the employee's culture and religious considerations. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of monetary reward practices and religious affiliation on the Muslim employees of the health sector in Pakistan.
Organizations strategize their policies to keep their employees more loyal and committed through monetary means (Aguinis et al., 2013). Individuals work in the society for the sake of earning and getting monetary benefits in return. Monetary rewards practices can be in the form of pay, compensation, bonuses, pension, profit share. These monetary rewards help to motivate employees to work in the same organization and stay committed for a longer period (Terera & Ngirande, 2014). Employee's perceived satisfaction from the rewards and benefits can foster positive perception of their organization. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, physiological needs are the basic needs of an individual's life (McLeod, 2018). The basic need which includes food, water, warmth, and rest can only be achieved if a person is healthy. Thus, the health sector is providing the services to enable individuals to fulfil their basic needs of life.
Islam is taken as a religion to study its impacts on the Muslim society, because it has been found to be a very influencing religion (Bhatti et al., 2016), impacting its followers routine life. Pakistan is taken as the population in this study because of having a Muslim majority country (Syed & Ali, 2019),with 95% to 98% Muslim population (Syed et al., 2009). Pakistan is facing major disruptions in the health sector because of less committed employees and around 75% of the employees are found to be dissatisfied with their jobs (Amin Yusufzai, 2018). Commitment has been defined by several authors as, it is the employee's loyalty to stay with the workplace (Jaros, 2007;Meyer et al., 2002). Employee commitment has three types; affective, normative and continuous commitment (Clugston, 2016) having different impacts on the employees. Some of the researchers found affective commitment to be more influencing than normative and continuous commitment (Fernandez Lores et al., 2016), others feel they all are having their specified role and significance (Ramalho Luz et al., 2018). In view of these studies, it is thereby important to study commitment including its multidimensional influence to find out its impact on the Muslim population.
Pakistan is one of the countries with a Muslim majority. There are several religions in Pakistan including, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism with Muslims representing 95-98% of the population. The health sector comprises of many employees embracing different religions with different levels of affiliations with the specified religion. Islam is a religion that teaches its followers to stay satisfied, loyal, and committed in every situation of life (Siti Khadija, 2015). Being the followers of Islam, the Muslim employees are perceived to be either more religious by exhibiting their religiosity by the level of commitment with the workplace or they are more in need of money, and monetary benefits enhance their commitment. Among the teaching of Islam, one of the factors having significant importance is to stay committed. Commitment in organizational aspect, is the loyalty of an employee to stay with the organization (Clugston, 2016), because of the affection, norms, or wanted to continue the state.
This study investigates whether religious affiliation of employees and monetary reward practices by organizations both are influencing the level of commitment to their organization. This study is taking the employees from a developing country with a high rate of inflation and the lowest rate of human development index as well as many are living near to the poverty line (Anwar & Shah, 2020;Padda, 2020). Pakistan is also facing a lot of brain drain towards other countries in search for better job opportunities (Ismail et al., 2011). In-line with the previous studies identifying issues in the healthcare system of Pakistan (M. Burhan et al., 2020;Ghazi et al., 2016;Mir et al., 2015), this study will identify the true aspects to resolve the issues faced by the sector.

Social Identity Theory
The theoretical consideration of this study is based on the social identity theory that provides a supportive fact for the religious and spiritual behaviour of employees. Social identity theory proposed that, people belonging to a certain religious or spiritual group or class, found themselves to be affiliated with that specific group and this identity is the origin of satisfaction to them (Tajfel & Turner, 2004). Employees having a social identity are perceived to be more committed (Robertson & Barling, 2014), with less intention to leave (Staniskiene et al., 2019). This theoretical interpretation of social identity theory has been studied by numerous scholars (Abu Arrah et al., 2018;Carmeli, 2005;Peterson, 2004). Social identity theory elaborates on an employee's association with the organization (Peterson, 2004). It specifies that employees who are more identifiable and enthusiastically involved in organizational activities are more inclined towards organizational commitment (Abu Arrah et al., 2018). This theory provided the support to the current study in this aspect that respondents of the current study being associated with religion (Habib Rana & Shaukat Malik, 2016;Shah & Lacaze, 2018;Spilhaus, 1942), and meanwhile are the nationals of a developing country (Budget, 2014;Nyikuli et al., 2017;UNDP, 2018;Wasimah et al., 2015), are examined to find out their either their job commitment is more effectively associated with their religion or they are more towards financial benefits.

Religious Affiliation as Predictor
Affiliation is the association of an individual with certain norms and values. These affiliations can be within the personality or outside which can be exhibited in public. Likewise, when an individual is following a specific religion, the belief of the religion will be reflected in public. Religious affiliation includes an individual's affiliations with the religion in respective dimensions, belongingness, identification, or professionalism (Field, 2014). These are the practices of the follower or believer either privately or in public. It is the identification of an individual who is affiliated with a specific religion (MacDonald & Luckett, 1983). People are associated with their religions regardless of their religion, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or Judaism. Their identification and conduct depend upon the extent of their affiliation.

Monetary Reward Practices as Predictor
Monetary rewards refer to providing financial facilities in the form of money as a result of fulfilment of a certain level of performance (Cao et al., 2013). These are the rewards that are paid to the employees in the physical aspect (Akafo & Boateng, 2015). On the other hand, non-monetary rewards help to employees to gain intrinsic motivation, such as to empower the employees with more responsibilities, training activities, verbal recognition, and appreciation (Choi et al., 2012). The monetary rewards, therefore, are more helpful to increase employee's extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, by having both physical and psychological satisfaction (Korir, 2016). The significance of these rewards has been studied by many researchers who found that it is the most important goal in getting a job. A proper and attractive pay structure not only helps to retain the current employees but also able to attract prospective employees.

Relationship between Religious Affiliation and Commitment
Nowadays, religious diversity is found to exist in many organizations (Messarra, 2014). Organizations that discriminate their employees based on their religion, confront negative employee attitudes, probably because of the religiously affiliated individuals (J. Williams, 2007). Employees' association with their religion effectively influences their behaviour to stay loyal with the workplace (Field, 2014). Study on the employee religiosity and its impact on their work engagement, discovered a positive and significant relationship between employee's religious associations and job outcomes (Abu Bakar et al., 2018). An employee with high Islamic values and norms, have an elevated level of organizational commitment in the personal and professional life (MacDonald & Luckett, 1983). Several studies found that religious identity and its freedom of expression has a positive impact on employee commitment (Hadi et al., 2014;Kutcher et al., 2010).
Researchers found that Islam has a positive impact on employee commitment towards the organization, where employees who are more inclined towards Islamic ethics and values are found to be more committed (Salahudin et al., 2016). Employees having an affective commitment with respect to Islamic ethics will have an emotional attachment towards the organization and Allah. While, normative and continuance commitment, are related to the self-esteem of the individuals to keep working with the organization to fulfil their needs and to act in a responsible way and staying accountable towards the workplace (Meyer & Parfyonova, 2010).
Religion always reflects the behaviour and conduct of a person. Thus, religious values and norms have a positive impact on the loyalty with the organization (Raharjo et al., 2019). Therefore, the existence of a positive association has been investigated between employees with Islamic affiliations and their commitment towards the workplace. Islam teaches its followers to live in justice and fairness. According to Farid et al., (2019), Islamic norms strengthen and augment the relationship between employees' justice perceptions and enhances their affection towards the organization (Athar et al., 2016). Employees in socially responsible work environment rely on the organization which practice on the basis of fairness and justice. Islamic ethics enhances employee commitment (Azwirman, Yuswar Z Basri, Zulhelmy, 2019).
Further studies established the importance of religious affiliations on employee's workplace attitudes such as, employee's job satisfaction, motivation, commitment and turnover (Affeldt & MacDonald, 2010;Gyekye & Haybatollahi, 2012;Hadi et al., 2014;Kutcher et al., 2010;Meyer et al., 2012). Commitment in its three forms, affective, normative, and continuance, is influenced by the level of religiosity of its followers supporting those specific religion norms. Thus, resulting towards one of the objectives of the study, to find out the (Gyekye & Haybatollahi, 2012;Olowookere, 2014;Yahchouchi, 2009). Thus, resulting towards the following hypothesis to fulfil one of the objectives of the study i.e to find out the relationship between religious affiliation and employee commitment.

Relationship between Monetary Reward Practices and Commitment
There are several organizational human resource practices to enhance employee capability. Some of them are monetary such as, compensation, rewards (Akafo & Boateng, 2015), and others are nonmonetary such as verbal recognition, award policy, supervisory, and co-worker support (Korir, 2016). Monetary rewards are the financial benefits organizations grant their employees in exchange for work done (Akafo & Boateng, 2015). These are the rewards stated in the organizational policies for the betterment of the organization. Employees are working for the sake of money, that is, maybe in some circumstances, money is the only motivator that enables them to work (Drenth, 2009;Shim & Faerman, 2017). It has been found that lack of fair monetary system causes low productivity, poor performance and low morale in the employees (Al-harbi, 2020). But the question is whether money is the only way to enhance their capability, performance, and loyalty with the organization.
Numerous findings have intensifying the monetary reward significance and elaborating the different kinds of rewards having diverse influence on employee commitment. One way to enhance employee's loyalty is by motivating them with the providence of money (Yousaf & Latif, 2012). These reward practices can be in the form of having a highly competitive salary or maybe bonuses or compensation in order to perform a specific task (Nayak & Sahoo, 2015).These practices help to attract and retain the employees in the organization. Employee retention causes the enhancement of organizational progress (Aguinis et al., 2013). Therefore, the significance of employee's needs and demands lies in the fulfilment in their workplace.
Studies also found variations in the importance of rewards by employees, such as the case in several countries like Pakistan or other developing countries with high inflation rates and people are unable to meet their daily expenditures from their income (Yousaf, Latif, 2012). Financial benefits are therefore a way to reduce poverty (Sastraningsih et al., 2020). It is important for those inhabitants to prefer monetary rewards instead of other kinds of non-monetary rewards. These rewards which can be in the form of free transport, free fuel, a free meal, or occasionally paid vacations may help to enhance employee's satisfaction. Moreover, the reason behind preferring monetary rewards can be due to needs related to family support or dependent care programs. If organizations provide the employees with other benefits so far, the possibility to take the facilities other than monetary rewards can also be high.

Development of Hypothesis:
1. A significant relationship is found between the religious affiliation of employees and their level of commitment to their organization. Previous studies found a positive relationship between religious affiliation of employees and their commitment to organization (Djafri Fares & Noordin, 2016;Hayati & Caniago, 2014;Rokhman, 2010;Salahudin et al., 2016). They explored that religious affiliation of employees enhances their employee commitment. Hence, based on the previous studies following hypothesis has been developed to fulfil the objective of the study: H1: There is a positive relationship between religious affiliation and employees' commitment.
2. Monetary reward practices influence employee commitment to their organization. According to prior studies, money plays a significant impact in any individual's personal, professional, and social life (Bacon et al., 1995). Several studies found a significant relationship between monetary reward practices and employees' commitment (Haider et al., 2015;Hassan et al., 2013;Yousaf, Latif, 2012).
H2: There is a positive relationship between monetary reward practices and employees' commitment.
3. As the targeted population is Muslim employees in the health sector, it is therefore necessary to determine whether religion matters more than the monetary benefits to keep employees committed with their organization. There is a strong influence of religion on the Muslims employees and they are found to be associated with their religious morals and values (Ali, 1988;Bhatti et al., 2016;Razimi, 2017;Salahudin et al., 2016). Prior studies identified the significance of religious affiliation on an individual's life (Ansari, 2020;Bae, 2020;Keister, 2011;MacCulloch & Pezzini, 2007;McCutcheon, 2004;McLaughlin et al., 2020).
H3: Religious affiliation impacts more than monetary reward practices on employees' commitment.

METHODOLOGY
Present research is focused on the human behaviour study and is quantitative in nature. A quantitative study is conducted using surveys to test a proposed theoretical model and hypothesis. It is a numerical interpretation of data (Minichiello, 1990). The population of the study was the Muslim employees of the health sector in Pakistan, currently at 62651(Jabri, 2016). The sampling technique used in this study is simple random sampling which give each respondent an equal chance for being selected (Ghauri et al., 2020). The logic behind choosing this sampling technique is to incorporate the data collection wisely, it is the most convenient way of choosing the respondents when there are a number of respondents and each is having an equal chance of being selected (Hair et al., 2010), because of the hectic time schedule of the health staff, the data was collected from the available staff.

Measurement of the Study
Since questionnaire development is very crucial for quantitative method, it is very important to state the process involved in developing the questionnaire such as, ensuring the validity of the instrument. In this study Likert scale questionnaire was used, and previous scale items were taken for the study constructs to ensure the validity of the instrument. The questionnaire was divided into two sections. The first section consists of demographic information about the respondents, while the second section contained the questionnaire items for the variables of the study. Monetary reward practices were measured by the 8-items scale (De Gieter et al., 2006). Questionnaire items were such as, '' my home taken pay'', '' my benefits package'' and ''my pay raise''. Employee's affiliation with their religion was measured by the 14-items scale (Gorsuch & McPherson, 1989). Questionnaire items were such as, ''I enjoy reading about my religion'', ''I have a strong feeling of Allah's presence''. Employee commitment was measured by the 20-items scale (Jaros, 2007). Questionnaire items were such as, "I am very happy being a member of this organization'', "I feel that I owe this organization quite a bit because of what it has done for me" and '' My organization deserves my loyalty because of its treatment towards me''.

Data Collection
Data was collected from 233 Muslim employees from the public and private health care centres in Pakistan. From a total of 400 questionnaires distributed among the employees of different hospitals, 284 were collected. Since some of the questionnaires were invalid due to unanswered questions, a total of 233 was found to be valid and usable, therefore, the study has a response rate of 58.25% from the total 400 distributed questionnaires. The details for the survey questionnaire with the number of floating, received, invalid and valid questionnaire are mentioned in Table -1.

Demographical Analysis
This section explains the demographical representation of the study population. As mentioned in Table-2, has the demographics consist of information on gender, age, marital status, education, experience, job sector, and job locality, as well as religion, which relates to the objective of the study. A descriptive analysis of 233 sample found that male employees represent 70.4 of the sample as compared to females representing 29.6%, thus showing the male majority. The mainstream of the employees with 45.5% was at the age of 25 to 30 years old.
Most of the respondents were married with a percentage of 68.7 while others were single. Data was collected from only Muslim employees to find the impact of Islamic affiliations on them and these respondents were taken randomly based on the simple random sampling technique in which each member of the population has an equal probability of being selected (Creswell, 2014). Concerning to education level, many of the employees were having a bachelor's degree (57.1%), while others were having diplomas (24.9%) and master's degree (11.2%). Respondents with job experience of 2 years or above were 40.3%, followed by 29.6% having 3 to 5 years. Employees with work experience of 6 to 10 years were 24%, 11 to 15 years of experience of employees were 2.1% and with 16 years and above were 3.9%. Respondents with 52.4% were from the private sector which forms the majority, 39.5% from the Government sector, while 8.2% were from the semi-government side. Respondents from the urban locality were 90.1% while the other 9.9% were from the rural locality. The internal consistency is achieved with the help of Cronbach Alpha (Osburn, 2000), which is the most frequent and familiar measurement technique for the internal consistency of the questionnaire items. In this test, the questions are split into two halves and the average of the correlation is taken to measure the contrast value. The nominal range of Cronbach Alpha is from 0 to 1. An alpha value greater than or equal to 0.9 is considered an excellent measure for internal consistency and 0.6 is on the lower threshold of acceptance (Hair et al., 2010).
Cronbach Alpha value for the 14-items scale for religious affiliation has the alpha value of 0.69, Monetary Reward Practices with the 8-items scale has a value of 0.94, and employee commitment with the 20-item scale has the value of 0.79. Cronbach Alpha value for religious affiliation is 0.69 which falls an in the acceptable range (Mohamad et al., 2015), concluded as fair value by Rasch literature (Fisher, 2007) and acceptable for social science research (Ghazali, 2008). Thus, all the values of the scale were under the acceptable range (Hair et al., 2010) as mentioned in the below table-3:

Correlation Analysis
Correlation analyses provides a measure of the relationship between variables regardless of the causal and effect of that relationship (Bewick et al., 2003). Its value ranges from -1 to +1, the negative value shows a negative/inverse relationship, while the positive value exhibits the presence of a positive relationship between the variables value of zero indicate no correlation between the variables (Hair et al., 2010). The value closer to 1 shows more strength.

Regression Analysis
Table-5 below exhibits the model summary of religious affiliation, monetary reward system, and employee commitment. In the first column, the r-square value for the overall model is calculated as R 2 = 0.325 which shows that 32.5% of the variance in employee commitment is caused by religious affiliation and monetary reward system.
It also shows the value of the beta coefficient as β=0.293, p<.01. It indicates that, at the level of significance at 0.01, every single unit increase in the religious affiliation causes an increase in employee commitment by 29.3%. The significance of the model is at 0.000 which means the model is statistically significant. Durbin Watson's value shows the autocorrelation relationship between the variables (Ketchen, 2013). This study has a value of 1.85 that shows a positive acceptable value of Durbin Watson. Therefore, the study accepted the following hypothesis, H1: There is a positive relationship between religious affiliation and employees' commitment.
The regression analysis of monetary reward practices and commitment shows the value for the beta coefficient as β=0.373, p<.01. It shows that at the significance level of 0.01, every single unit increase in the monetary reward practices causes an increase in employee commitment by 37.3%. Durbin Watson's value shows the autocorrelation relationship between the variables (Ketchen, D. & Berg, 2006). This study has a value of 1.80 that shows a positive acceptable value of Durbin Watson. Therefore, the study accepted the hypothesis, H2: There is a positive relationship between monetary reward practices and employees' commitment.
Beta value also shows that the monetary reward system has a higher influence on employee commitment as compared to religious affiliation. The beta value for the Monetary reward system is greater than the beta value of religious affiliation, β = 37.3%>29.3%. Therefore, hypothesis, H3 is rejected: It is anticipated that religious affiliation has influence on employees' commitment as compared to monetary reward practices.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This study attempts to examine the relationship between organizational monetary reward practices, employee religious affiliation and employee commitment. The statistical analysis of Muslim employees of the health sector in Pakistan found that monetary reward practices have a positive and significant impact on employee's commitment. It also elaborated that the organization providing employees with monetary benefits have more committed employees in line with findings of the previous studies (Hussain, 2013;Özutku, 2012;Smith, 2005;Tessema et al., 2013). On the other hand, examining Muslim employee's affiliation with their religion, the findings indicate that Islam has a positive effect on employee's intention to stay committed with their workplace, as mentioned in the previous studies (Gyekye & Haybatollahi, 2012;Leat & El-kot, 2007;Sadozai & Yousufzai, 2013).
This study also explored another side of the relationship, being a Muslim society, the impact of religion on the follower must be higher than any other thing. But this study identified that, monetary reward practices effect more on the Muslim employees of the health sector as compared to their affiliations with the religion. There might be several reasons for being attracted to a job for the sake of money compared to religion. As the employees belong to the country where the economy is still not well-developed, the high inflation rate compared to the pay rate, thus making it difficult to manage expenses in the fixed general pay. Secondly, the utmost number of the respondents are male, in Pakistan culture most of the families are supported by a single family member, and most probably a male. That is why they prefer money regardless of anything. Thirdly, the fact that most of the respondents are married, they may have families to support, which can also be the reason for the high correlation between monetary rewards value and commitment.
This study will help the practical understanding of the more effective organizational practices implemented by the organizations and their values in employee's perception. It will help them to make understanding of the employees and their needs and preferences. The organizations which are working for the sake of profit maximization should also acknowledge the importance of employee commitment in their organizational strategies. This study will help them to set up a structured system and a systematic approach to retain the existing employees to avoid the cost of hiring new ones.