In this chapter, the conclusions, research limitations, recommendation, and practical implications were provided based on all the results and discussions.
Conclusions
As the conclusion of this study, results and findings showed that among Japanese companies, the employee’s perceptions of support from the organization were related to their commitment towards the organization. The purpose of this study was to find how to encourage Japanese employee’s commitment. This study had two approaches to investigate the questions.
First, this study investigated how perceived organizational support (POS) influence organizational commitment.
Secondly, this study examined whether organizational justice moderated the relationship between POS and organizational commitment. For more details, the summary of the results of investigating the relationships among three variables is shown below.
Perceived Organizational Support and Organizational Commitment
Based on the results and discussions, the first hypothesis, the positive relationship between POS and organizational commitment, is verified. The results of the correlation analysis and linear simple regression analysis proved this relationship. It indicated that if employees feel more that the company appreciates their contributions and the more they perceived that the company cares about their well-being, their willingness to contribute to the organization should increase.
Next, the results of the regression analysis of POS and each sub-dimensions of organizational commitment, affective commitment, continuous commitment and normative commitment helped us understand more about hoe POS influence the employees’ sense to the commitment. POS was found to have the strongest relationship with normative commitment among three sub-dimensions. It showed that if the employees feel more that the company appreciates their contributions or if they feel more that the company care about their well-being, the employees tend to increase the obligation to contribute to the company. Normative commitment is determined to the employee’s sense of obligation to remain the organization
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and the sense of duty to contribute to the company. Thus, it would not be in a negative context to attempting to encourage commitment or loyalty to the company by creating a sense of obligation, especially in characteristics of the Japanese work environment.
Lastly, although it affects less, POS still also had a positive impact on employee’s intent to remain the company, which is based on the result of the regression analysis of POS with continuous commitment.
Organizational Justice as a Moderator
The second hypothesis, the moderating role of organizational justice on the relationship between independent variable POS and dependent variable organizational commitment, is not supported. The results from the hierarchical analysis confirmed that organizational justice was not a moderator on the relationship between POS and organizational commitment. It means that the different levels of organizational justices do not influence the relationship between POS and organizational commitment in different ways or at different levels.
In this study, comparisons between groups were tested with independent t-test analysis method and one-way analysis of variance method. The results showed that statistically significant difference among each age groups was not found in the mean value in the response of organizational. From this result, the author conducted the regression analysis with data from the younger age groups only (under 35 years only). The results were the same as with all samples, as the regression results showed no significant moderating effect of organizational justice. It suggested that regardless of age, organizational justice’s influence as a moderator was not related to this relationship between POS and organizational commitment.
Limitations
Although this study achieved planned purposes, still it has several limitations. Firstly, this study conducted the quantitative approach, so the data was collected by using only self- reported questionnaires, which might affect the results since these kinds of questionnaires might have some bias by the respondents.
Secondly, in this study, the participants were limited to Japanese employees who are currently working in Japanese companies, although the industries, tenure and age groups were equally diverse. Therefore, the results of this study were likely to reflect the orientation of
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Japanese characteristics of the willingness to contribute to organizations or the custom of the Japanese work environment. From these perspectives, it is inappropriate to adopt the results of this study to other countries’ and regions’ situations without considering the regional or environmental characteristics in which people might have different attitudes towards work itself and different commercial practices.
Thirdly, it is not possible to apply the results into all 66milions of employees in Japan (Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan, 2018) since the number of the samples are only 207. This sample size is due to the deletion of the eight responses that had a high missing value out of the total 215 participant responses. Therefore, if future researches try to generalize the results over larger groups, it requires more participants.
The findings and the results of this study could provide some implications for both future research and practical execution.
Recommendations
This study showed that for the future researches in the HR field should adopt the new approaches to execute a study better.
Firstly, since participants of this study were only limited to Japanese employee who work in Japan, and Japanese capitalized company, conducting a similar study on another countries or religion where there is different characteristics from Japan would provide very interesting results and implications. Moreover, comparative study of among different countries and regions with different labour market’s characteristics and with different work attitude could be significant.
Secondly, this study focused on only the employee’s general perception for overall organizational support. Therefore, further researches need to be conducted to determine what kind of support from the organization to employee will bring about the results.
Thirdly, based on the interest of the researcher and the results of previous research review, this study only focused on the relationship of three variables, POS, organizational justice and organizational commitment. These three factors might not be the only variables for studying employee’s contribution towards the organization. For future researches, other factors can also be investigated.
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Fourthly, the future researcher can also conduct the observation methods or interview which would allow obtaining much more in-depth information on the employee's situations.
Lastly, since this study was conducted to study the effect of POS towards organizational commitment and the moderating role of organizational justice, it did not investigate how to increase POS.
Implications
This study offers important information for the organization or HR practitioners. They can use this analysis as a tool to understand the behaviour of the employees. This information will serve as a guideline to motivate employees' commitment. Following are some implications.
POS is a concept that focuses on the perception of employees how the initiatives and responses of the organizations affect the employees’ evaluation of the organization. Moreover, this study confirms that POS had a positive impact on organizational commitment.
Implications for the Organizations
Based on the above, if the organization try to persuade the employees' commitment, the organization should be aware of how employees perceive the organization's initiatives and responses. The organization must be receptive to the importance and effectiveness of the policies that HR are developed for improving POS. Furthermore, these policies are those that work on changing employee's perceptions. Therefore, organizations need to accept that they cannot expect an immediate improvement in the situation. If HR introduces measures to improve POS and does not see an increase in employee commitment or even a decrease in turnover in a short period, it should not order HR to introduce new measures right away.
Implications for HR practitioners
According to Allen (1992), the factors that facilitate employees' POS are to have informal communication with their supervisors, to have communication about the employees' career development within the organization and about the care from the organization to the employees’
well-being. With this previous achievement and the results of this study, if HR tries to persuade employees’ commitment through motivating POS, they should provide opportunities for supervisors to give attention to employees' career development and employees' well-being. For
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example, regular meetings between supervisors and subordinates for the employees’ career development and for communicating employees’ well-being are essential.
Among the sub-dimensions of organizational commitment, normative commitment was found to have the strongest positive correlation with POS. In addition, for the regression equation, the coefficient of determination of POS on normative commitment was resulted in also the highest.
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APPENDIX A: ENGLISH LETTER AND QUESTIONNAIRE
Dear Participants
I am a graduate student in Graduate Institute of International Human Resources Development at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). I have a desire to collect data in order to investigate to how to encourage employee’s commitment in organization.
This study aims to investigate how to draw the commitment from tenure employee in Japanese company. Your dedicated time and honest responses will help prepare future training practitioners, HR practitioners, leadership practitioners, and other that related to this area.
The questionnaire is anonymous and your personal information will be confidential and the researcher does not disclose or transfer information and data to the third parties, also there are no specific answer in this questionnaire, feel free to fill this survey based on realistic situation in this organization.
Finally, it is grateful for us to have you as our respondents in this study.
Thank you for your time and cooperation.
If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Sincerely yours,
Graduate student: Shinobu Manda Advisor: Dr. Chih-Chien Steven Lai
62 PART 1 (General information)
Please select the demographic information about you.
1. Gender
1. Male /2. Female 2. Age
1. Under 24 years /2. 25 - 29 years /3. 30-34 years /4. 35-39 years /5. 40-44 years/
6. 45-49 years /7. Above 50 years
3. Tenure
1. Less than 1 year/2. 1 to 5 years/3. 6 to10 years/4. 1to15 years/5. More than 15years
4. Position
1. Manager /2. Non-managerial positions
5. Industry
1. Agriculture and forestry/2. Fisheries/3. Mining and quarrying of stone and gravel/
4. Construction/5. Manufacturing/6. Electricity, gas, heat supply and water/
7. Information and communications/8. Transport and postal activities/
9. Wholesale and retail trade/10. Finance and insurance/
11. Real estate and goods rental and leasing/
12. Scientific research, professional and technical services/
13. Accommodations, eating and drinking services/
14. Living-related and personal services and amusement services/
15. Education, learning support/16: Medical, health care and welfare/
17. Compound services/18. Services, n.e.c./ 19. Government, except elsewhere classified/
20. Industries unable to classify
63 PART 2 (Organizational Justice: 組織公平性尺度)
Please indicate the degree of your agreement or disagreement with each statement by checking one of the five alternatives below each statement.
Procedural justice
The following items refer to the procedures used to arrive at your (outcome)
To what extent:
Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree
1 Have you been able to express your views and feelings
during those procedures? 5 4 3 2 1
2 Have you had influence over the (outcome) arrived at by
those procedures? 5 4 3 2 1
3 Have those procedures been applied consistently? 5 4 3 2 1 4 Have those procedures been free of bias? 5 4 3 2 1 5 Have those procedures been based on accurate
information? 5 4 3 2 1
6 Have you been able to appeal the (outcome) arrived at
by those procedures? 5 4 3 2 1
7 Have those procedures upheld ethical and moral
standards? 5 4 3 2 1
Distributive justice
The following items refer to your (outcome).
To what extent:
Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree
1 Does your (outcome) reflect the effort you have put into
your work? 5 4 3 2 1
2 Is your (outcome) appropriate for the work you have
completed? 5 4 3 2 1
3 Does your (outcome) reflect what you have contributed
to the organization? 5 4 3 2 1
4 Is your (outcome) justified, given your performance? 5 4 3 2 1
64 Interpersonal Justice
The following items refer to (the authority figure who enacted the procedure).
To what extent:
Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree
1 Has (he/she) treated you in a polite manner? 5 4 3 2 1
2 Has (he/she) treated you with dignity? 5 4 3 2 1
3 Has (he/she) treated you with respect? 5 4 3 2 1
4 Has (he/she) refrained from improper remarks or
comments? 5 4 3 2 1
Informational Justice
The following items refer to (the authority figure who enacted the procedure).
To what extent:
Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree
1 Has (he/she) been candid in (his/her) communications
with you? 5 4 3 2 1
2 Has (he/she) explained the procedures thoroughly? 5 4 3 2 1 3 Were (his/her) explanations regarding the procedures
reasonable? 5 4 3 2 1
4 Has (he/she) communicated details in a timely manner? 5 4 3 2 1
4 Has (he/she) communicated details in a timely manner? 5 4 3 2 1