A study on relationship between employees ’ psychological empowerment and organizational commitment

Article history: Received December 28, 2013 Accepted 4 May 2014 Available online May 5 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between employees’ psychological empowerment and organizational commitment in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran. The study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring the effects of psychological empowerment developed by Mishra and Spreitzer (1998) [Mishra, A. K., & Spreitzer, G. M. (1998). Explaining how survivors respond to downsizing: The roles of trust, empowerment, justice, and work redesign. Academy of management Review, 23(3), 567-588.] and the other for measuring organizational commitment developed by Meyer and Allen (1991) [Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1991). A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment. Human resource management review, 1(1), 61-89.]. Cronbach alphas for psychological empowerment and organizational commitment are calculated as 0.81 and 0.92, respectively, which are well above the minimum acceptable levels. The results of our survey have indicated that there were positive and meaningful relationships between psychological empowerment and organizational commitment components including Sense of efficacy (r = 0.414, Sig. =0.000), meaningful (r = 0.481, Sig. =0.000), having a choice (r = 0.341, Sig. = 0.000) and trust (r = 0.736, Sig. =0.000). However, the survey does not support any relationship between Competency and organizational commitment. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Organizational commitment is an important subject of research and employees' psychological empowerment has become an area of investigation among many researchers in the fields of organizational behavior.There are literally several studies on human resource management where the effects of organizational commitment on other issues such as employees' psychological empowerment have been fully investigated.Kheirkhah et al. (2014), for instance, detected critical factors influencing on organizational commitment.They selected the most important factors, which are grouped in four categories and using factor analysis they reported that Affective commitment, Continuous commitment, Moral commitment and Enduring commitment were the most important factors influencing organizational commitment.Miarkolaei and Miarkolaei (2014) studied the relationship between employees' job satisfaction and organizational commitment of Red Crescent Society's Textile Industries of Islamic Republic of Iran by applying Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) and Allen and Meyer's Organizational Commitment Questionnaires for collecting data (Allen & Meyer, 1990).They reported significant relationships between employees' job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and their dimensions.Mirzaiefar (2014) presented an application of Huber model on the impact of psychological empowerment of employees on organizational learning.The results of the data analysis indicated that psychological empowerment of employees could impact on organizational learning aspects in organization, significantly.Alikhani et al. (2014) presented an empirical survey to study the relationship between social capital and organizational commitment.The study considered the relationship between social capital with three components of organizational commitment; namely, affective commitment, continuous and normative commitment.They reported that there were positive and meaningful relationships between social capital and affective commitment, continuous and normative commitment.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between employees' psychological empowerment and organizational commitment in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran.The study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring the effects of psychological empowerment developed by Mishra and Spreitzer (1998), which consists of 15 questions and the other for measuring organizational commitment developed by Meyer and Allen (1991) with 24 questions.Cronbach alphas for psychological empowerment and organizational commitment are calculated as 0.81 and 0.92, which are well above the minimum acceptable levels.The sample size of the paper is calculated as follows, where N is the population size, bachelor degree of science and finally, most of the participants had over 15 years of job experiences.The main hypothesis of the survey is as follows, Main hypothesis: There is a positive and meaningful relationship between employees' psychological empowerment and organizational commitment (OC) in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran.
In addition, the study considers the following five sub-hypotheses.
1.There is a positive and meaningful relationship between psychological empowerment and Competency in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran.
2. There is a positive and meaningful relationship between psychological empowerment and Sense of efficacy in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran.
3. There is a positive and meaningful relationship between psychological empowerment and being meaningful in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran.
4. There is a positive and meaningful relationship between psychological empowerment and having a choice in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran.
5. There is a positive and meaningful relationship between psychological empowerment and trust in revenue agency of city of Semnan, Iran.
We first have performed Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to find out whether the data were normally distributed or not and our results have indicated that all data were normally distributed (α = 0.01).

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing various hypotheses of the survey.Table 1 shows details of our findings on Pearson correlation ratios.

Direct and positive
As we can observe from the results of Table 1, there is a positive and meaningful relationships between psychological empowerment and four OC components; namely, Sense of efficacy (r = 0.414, Sig.=0.000) , meaningful (r = 0.481, Sig.=0.000), having a choice (r = 0.341, Sig.= 0.000) and trust (r = 0.736, Sig.=0.000).However, the survey does not support any relationship between Competency and organizational commitment.In summary, the survey supports a positive and meaningful relationship between organizational commitment and psychological empowerment (r = 0.607, Sig.= 0.000).We have also performed Freedman test to rank various effective factors and Table 2 demonstrates the results of our survey.According to Table 2, being meaningful is number one important factor influencing psychological empowerment, followed by Sense of efficacy, having a choice and trust.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the relationship between psychological empowerment and organizational commitment in one of revenue agencies in city of Semnan, Iran.The results of our survey have indicated that there were positive and meaningful relationships between psychological empowerment and four OC components; namely, Sense of efficacy (r = 0.414, Sig.=0.000), meaningful (r = 0.481, Sig.=0.000), having a choice (r = 0.341, Sig.= 0.000) and trust (r = 0.736, Sig.=0.000).The results of our survey are consistent with other similar results (Turner & Chelladurai, 2005;Canipe, 2006;Kheirkhah, 2014).

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.Personal characteristics of the participantsAs we can observe from the results of Fig.1, 74% of the participants were male while only 26% of them were female.In terms of educational backgrounds, 84% of the participants maintained at least a

Table 1
The results of Pearson correlation ratio between organizational commitment and psychological empowerment

Table 2
The summary of Freedman test