Employee engagement as an antecedent of organizational commitment – A study on Indian seafaring officers

Abstract

Employee engagement has been the most widely researched area of human resource in recent times because of its practical importance in business organizations today. Engagement plays a major role as an antecedent in many organizational outputs like employee performance, commitment, and competitive advantage, etc. This research paper is aimed at identifying the factors contributing to employee engagement and its association with the affective, continuance and normative modules of organizational commitment among Indian ship officers. This research work attempts to explore the correlation existing if any, between work and organizational engagement variables with three aspects of organizational commitment. The whole study is mainly focused on seafarer's perspective and so few alterations in questionnaires of engagement and commitments were made in discussion with experts from the shipping industry. This study confirms that employee engagement is positively associated with affective and normative components whereas, engagement is not significantly associated with continuance component of organizational commitment which is a contradicting result from existing studies where continuance commitment has reported a significant negative relationship with engagement. This study also discloses the fact that the engagement and commitment levels of officers working with deck and engine department did not contrast significantly, nor did they significantly differ between officers working in different types of ships, different designations and between officers with a different experience.