INFLUENCE OF JOB SATISFACTION AND ORGANISATIONAL COMMITMENT ON ABSENTEEISM IN SCHOOLS

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1 INFLUENCE OF JOB SATISFACTION AND ORGANISATIONAL COMMITMENT ON ABSENTEEISM IN SCHOOLS 1 VIRAIYAN TEEROOVENGADUM, 2 VANISHA SOODHOO, 3 BOOPEN SEETANAH, 4 KESHAV SEETAH 1,2,3,4 Faculty of Law and Management, University of Mauritius, Mauritius 1 v.teeroovengadum@uom.ac.mu Abstract- The aim of this study was to determine the impact ofjob satisfaction and organisational commitment on voluntary absenteeism of teachers in secondary schools. The population of this study consisted of all educators in the 176 secondary schools in Mauritius. For the study purpose, a judgmental sample technique was used to identify one educator from each school. To measure the variables, the research instrument was the questionnaire.data received were tabulated, analyzed and interpreted. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify dimensions of job satisfaction and organizational commitment while at the same time testing for convergent validity of the constructs. A descriptive analysis allowed for the assessment of current level of job satisfaction and organisational commitment. To test for the effect of job satisfaction dimensions and organisational commitment dimensions, multiple regression analysis was performed. In light of the results, it was found that absenteeism isindeed influenced by some job satisfaction and organizational commitment dimensions. Recommendations are finally made based on the findings which aim at helping school administration to reduce the rate of. Keywords- Education, Teachers, Absenteeism, Leadership Style, Job Satisfaction, Work Environment, Motivation I. INTRODUCTION Absenteeism often results in stagnation of work and high costs. Absenteeism is undesirable for employers, employees and their colleagues. The phenomenon of absenteeism in the workplace is not a new problem. Throughout history, organisations have had to deal with the short-term replacement of absent employees. School leaders have the duty of replacing short term absences of educators on a daily basis so that students are not left unattended.secondary schools whose main aim it to provide academic knowledge must also adapt to a changing environment so as to be able to cope with present challenges and must also be able to anticipate for the future needs. School leaders need to motivate and bring out the best of their employee and reducing absenteeism rate remains a major challenge. The managerial problem identified is absenteeism of educators in secondary schools. This is a growing concern in all institutions. Absences of educators have increased the workload of each and every staff. Absenteeism has created frustration among colleagues as the work must be done and educators are obliged to do so, so as to keep the school running. Very often the same staff needs to be replaced. Others think that their colleagues are shirking responsibilities. With the implementation of the PRB in 2008, the Government of Mauritius has decided to refund educators all their unutilized casual leave, so as to reduce absenteeism rate. Nevertheless; they continue to be absent from work. Educators absenteeism rate is a growing concern as it continues to rise and so does the consequences associated with it such as the financial expenditure and the realm of student achievement. This research will focus onthe influence of job satisfactiondimensions and organisational commitment dimensions on absenteeism rate in secondary schools in the context of Mauritius. The specific objectives of this research are: (1) To evaluate absenteeism rate; (2) To investigate whether job satisfaction, organisational commitment are influencing educators absenteeism; (3) To come up with appropriate strategies to reduce absenteeism. II. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Absenteeism in the Education Sector Absenteeism according to Casio (2003) is any failure of an employee to report for or to remain at work as scheduled, regardless of reason. Strickland (1998) stated that absenteeism is a period of not attending school. Teacher absences disrupt the routines and relationships which support the learning process (Miller et al, 2007).According to Bruno (2002), teacher absenteeism has a negative impact on students. When teachers absent themselves, students lose the desire to learn. Thus student achievement falls and student are not connected to the classroom.bruno (2002) further stated that when there is high absenteeism rate of one educator, it affect other educators morale thus resulting in higher educators absenteeism. Other consequences of absenteeism include costs increase, lower morale of employees, workloads of employees increase;both managers and supervisors are frustrated;productivity suffers; objectives are not reached; services are not up to the standard; quality of the service suffers; negative perception and lack of confidence andadverse effects on students (Bruno, 2002). However, as noted by Sagie (1998) it is important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary absenteeism. Voluntary absenteeism refers to that time of absence from work which is not due to unforeseen circumstances outside the control of the employee such as family commitment, physical 1

2 illness or other external constraints. On the other hand implies that the employee decides not to attend work despite having no external factors that prevent him or her from doing so. It is therefore only which can be rationally predicted by job satisfaction and organisational commitment (Sagie, 1998). findings of Angel and Perry (1981), it is hypothesized that: H 2.Organisational commitment dimensions have a direct effect on III. METHODOLOGY 2.2 Determinants of Absenteeism Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism Job satisfaction means the psychological responses towards one s job. Locke (1976) stated that job satisfaction is a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences".oshagbemi, (2003) stated that one of the key roles of human resource managers is that they should keep their employees happy and satisfied. Satisfied employees will have a positive impact on organisational achievement sincesatisfied employees are more innovative and committed to their job. As a result satisfied employees are less absent from work. Kehinde (2011) stated that there are seven extrinsic factors (pay, promotion, work interest, supervision, co-workers, working condition and fairness of supervisors) of job satisfactionthat have a direct impact on absenteeism. Similarly, Thirulogasundaram and Sahu (2014) stated that absence results when employees avoid a dissatisfying work situation. Employees who find their job pleasurable are less likely to be absent. Frustration and de-motivation due to lack of extrinsic and intrinsic satisfaction, leads to absenteeism. In light of the existing literature it is therefore hypothesized that: H 1.Job Satisfaction dimensions have a direct effect on Organisational commitment and Absenteeism Organisational commitment is the psychological attachment that one feels for his or her organization (Meyer and Allen, 1990).Van Knippenberg and Van Schie (2000) stated that highly committed workers tend to achieve the organisational goals by maintaining regular attendance at work.rentsch and Steel (2003) confirmed that a high-committed workforce strictly follows attendance norms thus they are less absent from the workplace.angel and Perry (1981) stated that if employees of an organisation are strongly committed, it will have higher participation and productivity. Such organisations will show a lower level of absenteeism and tardiness among others. However, the research did not show a statistically significant association between organisational commitment and absenteeism. Organisational commitment can be viewed as a multi-dimensional construct (Meyer et al., 1993) and therefore the dimensions are expected to have a significant effect on absenteeism. Consequently, in light of the supporting literature and despite the opposing 2.1. Sampling and Data Collection The target population consists of educators in national, state, private aided and private unaided secondary schools. The population of this study is 176 secondary schools, consisting of around 7430 educators (Educations Statistics, 2014) educators are too large to attempt to survey, so a small but carefully chosen sample, 176 educators have been used to represent the population. That is, one educator from each secondary school. The sample size chosen is one educator in each school which is 176. A purposive / judgmental approach was used to choose educators in each school to answer the questionnaire. A purposive approach, which is a non-probability technique, focuses mainly on the person of interest which enables investigators to get best answers for the questionnaire.out of the 176 questionnaires submitted, 139 questionnaires were returned which represent a response rate of 79%. Out of the 139 questionnaires returned, 3 of them contained a high amount of missing values and were therefore omitted resulting in a total of 136 valid responses Questionnaire Design and Measurement Scales The survey instrument comprised of seven sections. Five sections aimed at measuring the various determinants of absenteeism, namely, leadership style, job satisfaction, work environment and organizational commitment. One section aimed at measuring the outcome variable voluntary absenteeism and finally one section captured background information about the respondents. All the indicators made use of a five point Likert scale whereby 1 indicated the lowest level of agreement and 5 the highest level of agreement. Job Satisfaction In this section, building on Kehinde (2011) level of job satisfaction was measured using factors such as salary, promotion, interest, working condition among others. This will help in considering if transformational leadership styles affect positively or negatively the level of job satisfaction. Organisational Commitment This section considered elements of loyalty, efforts put into the job and values and opinion one has for the school. The scales were adapted from Meyer et al. (1993). 2

3 Absenteeism This section considered reason as to why educators were absent from work. Absenteeism as explained previously was operationalized as voluntary absenteeism. Scales were adapted from Darr and Johns (2008) Data Analysis Techniques Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify dimensions of job satisfaction and organizational commitment while at the same time testing for convergent validity of the constructs. A cut-off value of 0.5 was used as recommended by Hair et al. (2006) for item retention. Reliability of constructs was tested using the 0.7 threshold Cronbach alpha value (Nunally, 1978). A descriptive analysis allowed for the assessment of current level of job satisfaction and organisational commitment. To test for the effect of job satisfaction dimensions and organisational commitment dimensions, multiple regression analysis was performed. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 3.1 Respondents Profile Out of the 136 respondents, 43.4% of them were male educators while 56.6% were female. The majority of the respondents 57 (41.9%)were between 35 to 44 years old and 43 (31.6%) respondents were between 25 to 44 years old. With regards to educational qualifications, the majority ofrespondents 60.3% are degree holders. Most of them had several years of experience as educators, the majority 42.6% have 11 to 20 years of service and 17.6% of respondents had more than 30 years of service Reliability and Validity of Scales This section presents the results of tests carried out to evaluate the dimensionality of job satisfaction, organisational commitment and voluntary absenteeism and assess their validity and reliability. Firstly, EFA isperformed for job satisfaction indicators. The analysis reveals that job satisfaction is best represented through a four factor structure, namely, personal development, reward and job prospect, working conditions and relationship at work. Two items are deleted during the process due to cross loadings. The items retained all have factor loadings higher than the 0.5 cut off point as shown in table 1 below. The four scales show evidence of reliability too, with Cronbach s alpha score ranging from 0.76 for the factor relationship at work to 0.89 for the factor personal development, all scores thus above the 0.7 cut off point. Table 1: EFA for Job Satisfaction Secondly, organisational commitment items are analysed using exploratory factor analysis. A KMO of and a Bartlett s test of sphericity with a significant value demonstrate that the data is appropriate for conducting EFA. The results show that organisational commitment is a threedimensional construct. The three dimensions identified are affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment. The first dimension affective commitment comprises of three items all with factor loadings greater than 0.5 as can be seen in table 2 below. Similarly, three items are retained for both the continuance commitment and the normative commitment construct. Finally, all the three scales obtain a Cronbach alpha score greater than the 0.7 threshold indicating sufficient level of reliability. Table 2: EFA for Organisational Commitment 1 Affective Commitment; 2 Reward and Job Prospect, 3 Working Conditions, 4 Relationship at Work Finally the construct is assessed for convergent validity and reliability. The results are shown in table 3 below. As can be seen the 3

4 EFA reveals that all items load highly (> 0.5) on the same factor thus showing evidence of both convergent validity and uni-dimensionality. The reliability analysis demonstrates that the scale possesses sufficient validity with a Cronbach Alpha score of 0.77 (> 0.7). Table 3: EFA for Voluntary Absenteeism H 1a.Satisfaction with personal development has a direct effect on H 1b.Satisfaction with reward and job prospect has a direct effect on H 1c.Satisfaction with working conditions has a direct effect on H 1d.Satisfaction with relationship at work has a direct effect on H 2a.Affective Commitment has a direct effect on H 2b.Continuance commitmenthas a direct effect on H 2c.Normative commitment has a direct effect on 3.2. Descriptive Statistics Having tested for constructs validity and reliability, the summated scores are computed and subjected to descriptive statistical analysis. The results are presented in table 4 below. All the variables are measured on a scale of 1 to 5. Table 4: Descriptive Statistics for constructs Basic assumptions of linear regression are first tested, the constructs are found to be sufficiently normally distributed with skewness and kurtosis values all within the -2 to +2 range (see table 4) as recommended by Hair (1998). The Durbin-Watson statistic of confirms the absence of auto correlation of error terms. Absence of multicollinearity is also indicated by VIF values of less than 10 (Field, 2009). The results of the regression analysis are therefore considered to be trustworthy. Firstly, with an adjusted R 2 value of 0.467, the multiple regression analysis results suggested that 46.7% of variance in absenteeism is accounted for by theregression model. Table 5: Model Summary 1 Mean; 2 Standard Deviation; 3 Skewness; 4 Kurtosis Firstly, the results show that on average educators are moderately satisfied with their job with mean scores ranging from 2.54 for the dimension reward and job prospect to 3.20 for the dimension relationship at work. The degree of organisational commitment also seems to be neither too low nor too high with mean scores close to the mid score of 3. The mean scores are actually slightly lower than 3, with affective commitment having the lowest score of Finally the extent to which educators reported to absent themselves from work voluntarily was rather low with a mean score of Hypothesis Testing Multiple regression analysis was performed so as to test for the effect of job satisfaction dimensions and organisational commitment dimensions on voluntary absenteeism of educators. This implies that seven hypotheses were tested. Hypothesis one as formulated in section 2 is sub-divided into 4 hypotheses relating to each of the job satisfaction dimensions, while hypothesis 2 is sub-divided into 3 hypotheses relating to each dimension of organisational commitment. The hypotheses tested are: In other words, job satisfaction dimensions and organisational commitment dimensions explain 47.6% of variance in educators absenteeism. Table 6: ANOVA As shown in table 6 above, the F test results in an F- value of corresponding to a significant result at the 1% significance level. This shows that the regression model is significantly better at predicting absenteeism than using the mean score. It also provides confidence that the result can be generalized to the study population. Table 7: Coefficients 4

5 happy to spend each day at work as far as possible. The school s problems need become their own and the school need to have a personal meaning to the educators. The school environment should be one where the employees can converse positively with others and can influence others to become affectively committed just like them. Assessment of the regression results with regards to individual relationships show that three hypotheses are supported while four of them are not. The three supported ones concern one dimension of job satisfaction, namely, relationships at work and two organisational commitment dimensions, namely, affective commitment and continuance commitment. As expected satisfaction with working conditions and affective commitment have an inverse relationship with. While on the other hand, continuance commitment which consist of items such as staying with this school is a matter of necessity as much as desire" has a positive relationship with. The factor having the highest influence on is affective commitment (β = ). CONCLUSIONS In light of the results, a number of conclusions can be drawn. Firstly the exploratory factor analysis conducted on the job satisfaction construct and organisational commitment construct revealed that both dimensions were not unidimensional but are in fact multidimensional as suggested by past studies (Meyer and Allen, 1990; Kehinde, 2011). Secondly, the descriptive analysis showed that both job satisfaction and organisational commitment are only at moderate level in Mauritian secondary schools. This means that there is scope for improvement with regards to both. Thirdly, the regression analysis showed that three factors have a significant influence on voluntary absenteeism and the one having the strongest effect is affective commitment. This study therefore contributes to existing knowledge by demonstrating the specific organisational commitment dimensions and job satisfaction dimension that actually impacts on. The results also have a number of managerial implications. Given the importance of affective commitment, school administrators should cultivate a positive work climate that will develop affective commitment of educators thus educators will be Relationship at work also deserves to be addressed given its impact on absenteeism. School administrators must develop a healthy working environment by improving their relationship with educators and the relationship between educators and other staffs. Teamwork improves relationship among and between employees and need to be encouraged. School leaders should focus on resolving conflicts between employees so as to main a healthy relationship between them. Finally the significant positive relationship between continuance commitment and implies that school administrators should make sure that educators are not working at their respective schools because they are obliged to but because they are willing to. It is important that educators be intrinsically motivated towards their jobs. School administrators should make sure that educators are able to find an inner source of inspiration that will make them love the work they do. For example, valuing there job as educators as the one who pass on knowledge to others and help in the advancement of a better society. Training opportunities can also be provided so that educators do not feel that that they are stagnating but instead are growing themselves as individuals. REFERENCES [1]. Allen N.J. and Meyer J.P. (1990) The measurement and Antecedents of affective, continuance and normative commitment to the organisation. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 63, [2]. Bruno J. (2002). The geographical distribution of teacher absenteeism in large urban school district settings: Implication for school reform efforts aimed at promoting equity and excellence in education. Education policy analysis, 10(32), 1-3. [3]. Casio, W. F. (2003) Changes in workers, work, and organizations. In W. C. Borman, D. R. Ilgen, and R. J. Klimoski (Eds.). Handbook of Psychology: Industrial Psychology. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. [4]. Hair, J.F. JR., Anderson, R.E., Tatham, R.L., and Black, W.C. (1998) Multivariate Data Analysis, 5th Edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. [5]. Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J. AND Tatham, R. L. (2006) Multivariate Data Analysis, India: Pearson Education. [6]. Kehinde, O.A. (2011) Impact of job satisfaction on absenteeism: A correlative study. European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 1(1), [7]. Locke,E.A. (1976) The nature and causes of job satisfaction. In M.D. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of industrial and organisational psychology (pp ). Chicago: Rand McNally. [8]. Meyer, J.P.and Allen N.J. (1991) A three component conceptualization of organisational commitment. Human Resource Management Review,1,

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