This chapter presents an overall description of this study, and it includes the background of the study and problem statement, followed by the purpose of the study, which guides readers to the purposes of this research, the research questions, delimitations and finally definitions of the key terms that are applied in the study.
Background of the Study
Global warming is currently a global threat, which could lead to climate change and create disasters; causing loss of properties and risk personal safety (World Health Organization, 2014). During natural or man-made disasters, the emergency response team is vital, firefighters play an important role to mitigate the consequences. With regard to firefighters, their job is putting themselves at risk in every mission to relief disasters and save people. Therefore, it is necessary to be concerned with firefighters’
personal safeties and to decrease citizens’ loss of lives and properties. Nowadays, firefighters are requested to work under strict and challenging situations because of several complex disasters caused by climate change (Withen, 2015). Hence, to handle those challenges, training lessons are essential for firefighters to acquire professional knowledge to prevent and relief disasters (Butler et al., 2013). Deciding to take this job as their career, most of them are strongly driven by their intrinsic motivation, which is an important factor that pushes firefighters to execute their missions (Thompson &
Bono, 1993). Apart from intrinsic motivation, leadership is another key factor to coordinate team members to effectively achieve goals and achieve higher levels of satisfaction amongst the firefighters (Kastros, 2013). As firefighters are satisfied with their job, they will be more committed to their fire agencies or departments and this
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will help them to accomplish their tasks (Abu-Shamaa, Al-Rabayah & Khasawneh, 2015). Since few studies in the past discussed motivation, leadership, satisfaction, and commitment in fire agencies, this study will be a profound and pioneer research in understanding the work conditions in this profession.
Typhoons, the meteorological natural disaster which often take place in Asian countries, like Taiwan, Japan, and China, will happen more frequently because of climate change (Rozynski, Hung, & Ostrowski, 2009). Although the east coastline of China encounters many tremendous typhoons and other disasters, the local citizens can be evacuated to other inland areas due to the huge national land area. However, in comparison, the land area of Taiwan and Japan are relevantly smaller, which can result in serious consequences when natural disasters strike the islands. For instance, victims of typhoons in Taiwan may lose their lives because many of them live in mountain areas where landslides are very common. Taking Japan as an example, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was not directly caused by 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, but by the following tsunami that destroyed the generators which incurred in overheating (Yoichi
& Heizo, 2011). Ultimately, many citizens were killed in this accident and all the survivors in Fukushima were forced to leave their hometown. If the firefighters had received related trainings and acquired knowledge for handling compound crisis, the evacuation procedures could have been better and more lives could be saved. After the event, Japanese government is devoting effects to educating firefighters and the public.
When facing disasters, firefighters have to be capable to conquer all challenges, otherwise victims and even firefighters themselves may lose their lives. Taking an example in Taiwan, in 2000, four workers were trapped by a strong flood when they were doing construction at the riverbed of Bajhang River. They stood on a rock and
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waited for rescue, but were ultimately washed away. The reason of this incident can be observed from four perspectives. The firefighters did not have relevant knowledge to rescue the workers in that condition, the communication was ineffective and inefficient, the leader did not properly make a decision, and they were not provided with critical equipment such as rescue helicopter for executing the rescue mission (Wikipedia, 2016).
To conduct an effective rescue, training is needed for preventing negative outcomes. Intrinsic motivation of firefighters (O’Reilly & Caldwell, 1980) and leaderships (Aydin, Sarier, & Uysal, 2013) also play important roles for firefighters to learn and be committed to achieve their goals. Using the SWOT analysis tool to analyze the firefighters in Taiwan, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are the following. For the strengths, they are driven by their intrinsic motivation, they also consider their job as meaningful and challenging, they believe in the value of helping people in need, and involve with other team members. In terms of the weaknesses, the shifts are long and extra hours are added when emergent incidents happen. Due to the job, firefighters are forced to sacrifice the time they should be spending with family, friends, and loved ones. As for the opportunities, besides receiving stable and fair salary, they have opportunities to receive on-job trainings that allow them to acquire diverse abilities and skills. Moreover, the rescue missions involve landslides, floods, earthquakes, fires, gas explosions, and nuclear radiation, and sometimes the emergencies take place across borders and across cultures, so they have opportunities to obtain international knowledge and skills and to become global and t-shaped talents.
Regarding to the threats, under the limited budgets, they do not have enough access to professional equipment, and their personal safeties are at risk of compound disasters that are in many times unpredictable. They are work in dangerous situations, risking getting injured and facing concerns of personal safety.
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To conclude, disasters can involve very complex elements and become more complicated with climate change. Therefore, firefighters are not only requested to be on duty for long working shifts but also require to diversely expand their professional knowledge and skills to handle compound disasters caused by this phenomenon (Day, 2014). Hence, the commitment of firefighters toward fire agencies or fire departments is considered important in this study, because by improving their commitment, firefighters may have lower turnover intention and will be more committed to execute their mission. Sometimes they work under pressure with twenty-four hours shifts and they are required to perform their tasks without any mistake (Institute for Career Research, 2006). To retain talents, research has it noted that organizational commitment is a negative predictor of turnover intention (Zhang, Zhang, & Xie, 2015). In addition, workers who are committed to their organization are more willing to devote themselves to their job and make efforts in contributing to better performance (Ingram, Lee, &
Skinner, 1989). With increasing organizational commitment, firefighters are more likely to learn more job-related skills and decide to stay in fire agencies. Kvaløy, Nieken, and Schottner (2015) found that human beings are not only motivated by tangible benefits at work. Therefore, the main objective of the study is looking for factors that have a relationship with firefighters’ organizational commitment towards fire departments for the purpose of achieving that the best talents in fire agencies become more committed to their organizations and fulfill the missions of helping residents in need.
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Problem Statement
The researcher arranged interviews with firefighters hoping to discover current problems that firefighters face. From the interviews, some problems were stated and reported by firefighters while others were observed by the researcher. First of all, compared to firefighters in countries with a high level of development such as United States and Germany, firefighters in Taiwan are required to work longer hours. In comparison, they have less days-off and their salary is lower, which means firefighters in Taiwan have to work more but earn less. Secondly, under the culture of the environment in Taiwan’s fire departments, junior firefighters are requested to take more tasks because the senior firefighters and supervisors tend to deliver their own duties to freshman firefighters. It not only makes the work distributed unequally but also causes junior firefighters to work under surplus burden and pressure. Thirdly, the system of the fire agency does not provide many motivators to drive firefighters at work. For instance, firefighters have to complete many tough and challenging missions, and they are not actually offered much bonus or compensation. Additionally, the opportunities for promotion are mainly based on education level, and without a fare education degree, one cannot easily be promoted regardless of how hard he or she works on their position.
Many firefighters that took the job as their career are not motivated by the benefits that they receive, but driven by their own intrinsic motivation toward this job. Unfortunately, they revealed that as their tenures increases, they actually lose their motivation. Finally, firefighters are needed by this island; especially because Taiwan is a country that suffers from many different kinds of natural disasters. It is important to retain those talents by improving their commitment so that they can be more willing to devote themselves to fire agencies.
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Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to measure the factors’ relationships by analyzing the collected data with IBM SPSS 23.0, SPSS Amos 24, and Smart PLS 3.0 software in order to test the positive or negative correlations:
Purpose 1: Measure the relationship between intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction.
Purpose 2: Measure the relationship between perceived transformational leadership and job satisfaction.
Purpose 3: Measure the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Purpose 4: Measure the relationship between intrinsic motivation and organizational commitment.
Purpose 5: Measure the relationship between perceived transformational leadership and organizational commitment.
Research Questions
Question 1: Will the job satisfaction of firefighters increase when firefighters are more intrinsically motivated by the value of their job?
Question 2: Will the job satisfaction of firefighters increase when the firefighters perceive their supervisors as transformational leaders?
Question 3: Will the firefighters be more committed to fire departments when they have higher job satisfaction?
Question 4: Will the firefighters be more committed to fire departments when they have higher levels of intrinsic motivation?
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Question 5: Will the firefighters show higher levels of commitment to fire departments if they perceive their supervisors as transformational leaders?
Significance of the Study
From the previous studies, past research practitioners in human resource research field focused their research objective on making profits or improving organizational performance, and few took their concerns on firefighters. In governmental organizations, the salary inflation is stable and fixed. Does money motivate people?
Many may believe so, but motivation is not only driven or affected by monetary benefits (Gagné & Deci, 2005). Instead, researchers like Richard Ryan, Edward Deci, Sam Glucksberg, Dan Ariely, Robert Eisenhower and other analysts from London School of Economics suggest that extrinsic motivators can lead to negative effects on performance (Mirabela-Constanta & Maria-Madela, 2011). Therefore, in this study, the researcher focused the study on intrinsic motivation and leadership hoping to examine how the factors can be associated with job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Delimitations
This study has two delimitations that helped setting the scope of this research.
Delimiting the scope is necessary to make the research more feasible. The first delimitation is that the current study only targets Taiwanese firefighters. Secondly, only full-time firefighters are taken into consideration.
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Definition of Key Terms
This section explains the definitions of the four variables: intrinsic motivation, transformational leadership, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Firstly, the adopted definition and description of each term will be clarified and then the researcher will account the specific definitions of the key terms under each construct of this study.
Intrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation is defined as motivators that are related with personal enjoyment, satisfaction, interest rather than collective goals or sense of involvement, and other extrinsic rewards or punishment. Intrinsic motivation also implies inherent satisfactions received when doing certain activities instead of focusing on the consequences (Ryan & Deci, 2000). It can also be defined as the degree that individuals are intrinsically directed and fascinated or interested in a specific task, and engage in it because of the task itself (Utman, 1997).
Operational Definition: In this study, the researcher defines intrinsic motivation as the motivator that drives firefighters to learn techniques that are related to their job, to successfully achieve their missions, and finally, to experience stimulations from the job.
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Transformational Leadership
The present study adopted the definitions of transformational leadership by Bass
& Riggio (2005). Transformational leadership is defined as leaders who inspire and stimulate followers to perform extraordinary, to improve the outcomes by developing potentials and abilities of the followers and their own leadership capacity during the process. Transformational leadership includes inspiring people to commit to a certain vision, it also involves making individuals share a collective goal, either for a unit or an organization, to achieve that, individuals must be challenged to become innovative problem solvers, transformational leadership also involves the development of followers’ abilities, this is usually achieved through mentoring, coaching, and providing them support and constant challenge.
Operational Definition: The leaders in fire departments are those who lead the team to achieve and accomplish tough missions. They are also responsible for training firefighters in the field with job-related techniques and physical development that are important skills to finish each challenging mission. A transformational leader is defined as someone who considers each individual’s difference, can motivate and stimulate firefighters to learn and to complete tasks, and can act as an idealized role model for their subordinates.
Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction was earlier defined as a positive emotional response that results from the appraisal of our job experience (Locke, 1976). It was then classified into 14 different facets: nature of the work, job conditions, fringe benefits, appreciation,
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organization, security, promotion opportunities, personal growth, coworkers, supervision, communication, recognition, and policies and procedures. (Spector, 1997).
The concept of job satisfaction was more recently defined as an individual’s emotional response towards the job, and the responses are multidimensional and they include three different components: affection, cognition, and behavior (Hulin & Judge, 2003).
Operational Definition: Job satisfaction is defined as participants’ perceived satisfaction of their supervisors’ leadership style and the communication channel and the way information and knowledge are disseminated in their fire departments. Besides, it includes their perceived satisfaction of the joy and meaning from the nature of work.
Organizational Commitment
Benkhoff (1997) defined organizational commitment as employees’ psychological or emotional attachment toward their organizations, indicating that organizationally committed people are willing make sacrifices for contributing to and benefiting the organization’s well-being (Pradhan & Pradhan, 2015). This study adopted Meyer and Allen’s model of commitment. They articulated that commitment has three different components corresponding to different emotional status. The model was created based on two reasons (Meyer & Allen, 1991):
1. Aid in the interpretation of existing research 2. To serve as a framework for future research.
Mercurio (2015) developed this model by reviewing the empirical and theoretical studies on organizational commitment, and they stated that emotional or affective commitment is the core essence of organizational commitment.
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Operational Definition: Organizational commitment is defined into three dimensions, firstly, as the psychological attachment that firefighters have towards their fire departments, secondly, as the accumulated commitment increased because the cost of resignation increases with their tenure, and thirdly, as their personal concept and perspective of the obligation to be committed to one’s organization.
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