Employees’ skills and Organisational Commitment

Abstract

Based on the survey Organisation, Learning and Competencies, the paper explores the relationship between skills development and organisational commitment. The findings, in general, suggest a low correlation between skills and more involvement in the organisations. Particularly, professionals show more attachment to their jobs than to their organisations, confirming that job commitment does not always imply organisational commitment. This work seeks to broaden our understanding of the distribution of technical ability and know-how of Italian employees among occupations and economic sectors in a period of important economic transformation. In particular, the aims are to present a comprehensive description of work skills in the Italian labour market and whether or not there exists a positive correlation between skills development, greater task discretion and more evolvement in the organisation. The data are from a new national representative survey of Italian employees working in the private sector. The survey, named OLC (Organization, Learning and Competencies) has been designed by ISFOL and conducted in the years 2004-2006. The term more appropriately found in the sociological literature to define the sense of attachment to an organisation is 'organisational commitment', which is considered strategic in periods of turbulence for the management of human resources. Organisational commitment, according some authors, 'implies identification with an organisation and acceptance of its goals and value as one's own' (Lincoln and Kalleberg, 1990, p. 22), or simply, the willingness of the individual to give higher commitment to work. In business management studies, the concept of commitment is also defined as the intensity relative to the psychological identification and employee involvement in the organisation. According to this definition, the consequences of commitment are, for example, the willingness to stay with the organisation, acceptance of the aims of the firm or, generally, the identification of employees with the values of the enterprise. However, 'organisational commitment' does not necessarily mean job or work commitment or attachment of individuals to their work (Gallie et al., 1998; Lincoln and Kalleberg, 1990). Research on the labour market tells us that the skills development of individuals is not always accompanied by an increase in the sense of attachment to an organisation. At times organisational commitment and work commitment can coincide, especially in the case of the taylorist method of management. Most organisational experimentation has tried to look at both aspects of the question: to improve interest in the work as well as to establish an effective cooperative system. Important from this point of view are the pioneering works of the Tavistock Institute summarised by Davis and Taylor (1972), and Federico Butera's 1972 and 1977 essays for Italy. However, we need to remember that whoever feels committed to work looks to the growth of his/her profession independently of the organisation's results while we can also have organisational commitment and strong identity with low-skilled jobs and tight supervisory control. In this case, commitment and identity can depend on other factors such as job security - as used to be the case in private industry in Japan for formal and informal lifelong employment - or a friendly work environment. In many industries the internal climate is considered as one of most important factors for enterprise management. A worker with a strong degree of personal identification with his/her organisation would not consider a close-knit organisation restrictive, while the same cannot be said for a worker who is inclined to self-realisation and individual creativity. However, skills development of individuals and commitment are often identified, especially in case studies, as an integral part of the human resources development process. In fact, according to Walton (1985) there exists a virtuous cycle between development of new technological and organisational systems, high quality processes and products, and quality of work and commitment. We find a similar virtuous cycle in the job re-design theory, where the growth