Organizational commitment in domestic violence agencies

• Main Author: Howard, April
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2008
• Subjects: Clinical psychology; Domestic violence; Occupational psychology; Organizational behavior
• ISBN: 0549796614; 9780549796619

The employees of domestic violence agencies provide emergency response, counseling, and advocacy that may help survivors recover from violence. When employees leave an organization, staff morale may decrease and workloads increase, reducing service delivery capability. Studies of employee turnover often focus on characteristics and attitudes of individual employees. Here, I examine not only individual factors but also how organizational functioning influences employee's commitment to their organization, which is considered to be closely related to turnover. To study organizational functioning, I developed a measure of organizational capacity that examines organizational infrastructure and business practices such as leadership, communication, and working conditions. Surveys of organizational capacity, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment were mailed to 12 domestic violence agencies in Illinois, yielding 98 completed surveys. The results indicate that employees had moderately high organizational commitment and moderate job satisfaction. Administrators had higher ratings of their organization's capacity and organizational commitment than direct service staff, but had lower job satisfaction ratings than staff. Standard multiple regression was used for analysis because of the small sample size. Initially, it appeared that position and organizational capacity had an effect on organizational commitment in part via their effects on job satisfaction. These results were discussed. However, upon further investigation, a suppressor effect was found that invalidated the results and interpretation of the findings. Position had little or no relationship to commitment, but the presence of position in the analysis strengthened the relationship between capacity and commitment. The suppressor effect was likely due to clustering of the data, which means that employees are situated in groups within organizations and their responses may be influenced by the similar factors in their organizations. The probability of clustering was confirmed with a moderate to high intraclass correlation coefficient, which represents the ratio of response variability within an organization compared to the total variability. This indicated that multilevel analytic modeling would have been appropriate. Future studies should collect larger sample sizes, both within and across organizations in order to model individual outcomes in terms of employee-level and organizational-level variables while adjusting for the amount of dependency in the data due to clustering.