The antecedents of job involvement: An exploratory study among Chinese prison staff

Abstract

Staff are an obvious and important resource for correctional organizations across the globe. One important area that concerns staff is job involvement (i.e., the psychosocial bonds between staff members and their jobs). The majority of the limited research on how work environment factors affect correctional personnel has examined U.S. staff. To fill this void, the current study used the job demands-resource model to explore how various personal characteristics and work environment variables affected the job involvement of staff at two prisons in southern China. The specific personal characteristics were age, tenure, gender, educational level, and assigned prison. The job demand variables were fear of victimization and role overload, and the job resource variables were instrumental communication, job autonomy, transactional justice, procedural justice, distributive justice, job variety, and supervision. Tenure, fear of victimization, transactional justice, distributive justice, job variety, and supervision had significant effects on job involvement in a multivariate regression analysis, while the other variables did not. Except for fear of victimization, which had a negative association, the other significant variables had positive associations with job involvement.