Dynamics of National Culture and Employee Characteristics on Organizational Commitment in Retail Banks in Ghana

Abstract

Firms operating in high growth sectors are known to face the challenges of hiring and assimilating large numbers of new employees, providing new knowledge and skills to existing employees, and addressing the need for a rapid expansion of leadership capability. In the Ghanaian situation, such a challenge is known to prevail, since the country implemented major financial sector reforms starting in the late 1980s as part of its broad market reforms, key of which is the deregulation of the financial sub-sector. The banking sector in Ghana is therefore, faced with human resource management challenges, which includes the finding of the right caliber of employees to employ, and how to ensure that employees get committed to their organizations in order to reduce their desire to switch to competitor firms, due to apparent dissatisfaction with their jobs. This study therefore, examined a conceptual model that sought to hypothesize the impact of national culture and employee characteristics on employees’ organizational commitment in retail banks in Ghana. The purpose is to understand the extent to which Ghanaian national cultural values and employee characteristics impact on employee organizational commitment in Retail Banks operating in Ghana. Quantitative data was collected from 282 bank employee across nine different retail banks in Ghana, and analyzed stepwise, using the analysis of moment structures (AMOS) program. Firstly, path analysis was conducted to test the individual measurement models that constitute the various components of the conceptual structural model. In this analysis, the factor score weights and model fit estimates for the indicator variables in the various latent variables (i.e. national culture, employee characteristics, and organizational commitment,) were appraised. Results from the path analysis identified four measurable indicators for organizational commitment. The analysis showed that all the measurable indicators tested for national culture and employee characteristics did not have significant loads to serve as measurable indicators. It is concluded that employees’ organizational commitment in retail banks in Ghana is neither influenced by the Ghanaian national culture nor the employee’s characteristics.