Differences in Occupational Commitment amongst Scientists in Indian Defence, Academic, and Commercial R&D Organizations

Abstract

Occupational commitment is referred to as the psychological link between an individual and his occupation that is based on an affective reaction to that occupation. Thus a person with higher occupational commitment strongly identifies and has positive feelings towards his occupation. It has been observed that R&D professionals have a very distinctive nature in their career orientations, value systems, and reward preferences. In R&D organizations, due to complexity of tasks, the employee and the employer often do not understand the nature of the job performance and therefore commitment to occupation is seen as an important contributing factor. Hence, this study addresses the following research questions: How does occupational commitment differ with the different types of R&D organizations? How do personal demographic, job satisfaction, and personality variables influence occupational commitment of different types? This study empirically examines the relationship among the personal characteristics of R&D scientists across three types of R&D organizations: A government commercial organization A government defence organization A government academic organization. The objective is to find out the influence of age, occupational tenure, job satisfaction, and occupational commitment on the five factor model of personality. A questionnaire of job satisfaction followed by the neo five factor personality inventory and occupational commitment questionnaires were administered on a sample of 126 R&D professionals. The results of the analysis revealed that: Occupational commitment of scientists does differ in these different R&D organizations. Occupational tenure is much higher for the scientists of the government commercial R&D organization and the government academic R&D organization compared to the scientists of government defence R&D organization. Job-satisfaction is the highest amongst the scientists of the government defence R&D organization followed by the scientists of the government academic R&D organization. Personality scores of the scientists also differ across these three organizations. Occupational tenure and age are not related to personality. Affective commitment is shown to have a positive and significant relationship with conscientiousness for scientists of the government academic R&D organization. Affective commitment is explained by occupational tenure and extraversion while continuance commitment is explained by job satisfaction and agreeableness in the government commercial R&D organizations. Extraversion (factor of personality) emerged as the strongest predictor of affective commitment in the presence of conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. For managers of R&D organizations, it is important to note that in the information-enabled world of today, occupational commitment rather than organizational commitment is likely to be the key variable in deciding whether to stay or leave.