In this chapter, it provided the introduction of the background of the study, the statement of the problems, the research purpose, the research questions, the significance of the study, the delimitation of the study and the definition of the key term.
Background of the Study
Recently, work perceptions are diversifying, and the mode of employment is becoming diversified in Japan (The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, 2008). It is clear that the relationship between individuals and organizations is changing. Therefore, there is a need to reexamine the conventional personnel management, human resource development, and organizational management which had been formulated based on the conventional lifetime employment system.
At the same time, the early departures of young people are becoming an issue. A law, which enacted in 2015, is to ensure employment opportunities for young people and also is to promote workplace retention. Moreover, many policies have been implemented based on this law. With concerns over labour shortages due to the declining birthrate and ageing population, keeping young people in the workplace has become an urgent matter nationwide.
Initially, the length of service of the employee in Japan is significantly longer than that in other countries even at present. A comparison of the average length of service of employee among all employed persons shows that the average of Japan is 11.9 years, Germany is10.7 years, France is 11.4 years, the United Kingdom is 8.0 years, and the United States is 4.2 years (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2018). Therefore, in order to further clarify the actual background of the problem, it is necessary to examine the differences in other employment indicators and the age groups of employees. Hamaaki, Hori, Maeda, &
Murata (2012) found that there is a clear downward trend of the share of lifetime employment that has been emerging among younger, university-graduated workers in Japan while older workers choose to keep in their present job by examining wage census data from 1989 to 2008.
Ono (2010) concluded that by collecting the wage census and labour force survey which are from the late 1980s and early 2000s, among workers who keep the continuous service at the same company at a certain level, long-term employment is still maintained, but the gap between those who are eligible for long-term employment and those who are not has been polarizing.
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According to the results of Kambayashi and Kato (2017), the decrease in the average length of tenure is caused by an increase in the number of employees with less than five years of service.
The number of employees who have worked in the same company for more than five years has not decreased.
In Japan, the internal labour markets are considered as a place for human resource development (Sato, 2012). A majority of Japanese workers develop their vocational abilities during their continuance in the organization. By Sato (2012), in the process of hiring young employees and career development, the first step is to hire a large number of new graduates who do not have vocational skills nor abilities. After hiring, training which is based on daily on the job training (OJT) in the workplace is carried out and as necessary, job training which implementing outside the workplace and self-development is complemented. This flow lets young employees get the ability to work. Moreover, with giving them opportunities for job rotation and the promotion, the company develops human resources through the formation of long-term in-house career development. This is the human resource development system that exists in the inter labour market and is the mechanism of human resource development in Japan developed mainly in large companies. With this long-term practice, for young generations who do not have enough skill nor experience, the opportunities to be hired as permanent employees are very limited. Most of the inexperienced young generations can apply for tenure positions only when they are at the final grade of the final education. Furthermore, even they are hired once when they graduated as a permanent employee, if they leave the company without acquiring sufficient work skill and experience, it becomes difficult to find regular positions in other opportunities again. So, the early resignation of young workers leads to losing opportunities for the career development of them.
As the progress of labour diversification has shaken the relationship between conventional individuals and organizations, workers' attitudes towards their organization are diversifying. Therefore, it will be necessary to understand how the efforts and responses of the organization are recognized and received by the employee more than ever.
Previous research shows that a committed employee is the employee who keeps staying within the organization. Organizational commitment can be defined as the desire to maintain organizational membership, identification with the purposes, successes of the organization, the loyalty of employees, and a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization (Aydin, Sarier, & Uysal, 2011). Moreover, Steers (1977) said that “highly
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committed” employees were found to have a more positive attitude towards their job, so commitment was significantly and inversely related to employee turnover.
The high turnover level may hinder the smooth transfer of skills and knowledge, and also may lead to losing the morale of the existing employee, the reputation of the company, even when the company has invested heavily in employee training.
To find the implications to promote the employees’ commitment to their organizations, previous researchers have identified various essential predictors of organizational commitment and perceived organizational support (POS) is one of them. Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, and Sowa (1986) defined POS as employees form beliefs about the extent to which their organization values their contributions and cares about them. This study focused on the influence of employee’s POS on their growth.
Although its impact on employee’s organizational commitment is significant, the employee’s perception of organizational justice (OJ) has not been elucidated to an adequate degree. OJ is defined as employees’ perceptions of how fairly they are treated by the organization (Colquitt, Greenberg, & Zapata-Phelan, 2005). To fill the gap between the findings and the practical issues, this study sets OJ as a moderator of two valuables. From these situations which involve vocational training practices and an increasing number of people who leave their jobs for a short period, this study is to state the problems that are needed to be resolved.
Statement of the Problems
As mentioned in the background of the study, there is a growing need for flexibility in employment patterns or new principles in human resource management in Japan. In the past, practitioners and academic studies have proposed new measures to replace or renew the traditional HRM policies. However, as people's views on work have been changing, no effective measures have been taken to cope with the situation in which people have left their jobs early or have less willingness to contribute to the company.
Under the current situation that to draw out the contribution and attachment of individuals to the organization, the organization is required to make efforts to understand the needs and perceptions of individual workers.
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At the same time, to understand the needs and perceptions of individual workers, it is more important than ever to understand what the organization's personnel policies are perceived as to employees.
It is anticipated that concepts and indicators reflecting the recognition and idea of the working people for the organization will become more and more critical theoretically and practically in the future.
Based on the above, this study focused on the individual's perspective and elucidated the mechanism of employee’s perception of the organization's approaches which tries to promote the contribution and the attachment towards an organization.
Research Purpose
The purpose of this study is to find how to encourage employee’s commitment by investigating the relationship between perceived organizational support (POS) and organizational commitment and is to examine whether organizational justice moderates this relationship among Japanese tenure employee.
Research Questions
This study is mainly to understand the relationships among perceived organizational support, and organizational commitment and organizational justice. Two research questions are formulated as follows.
1. Does perceived organizational support have a relationship with organizational commitment?
2. Will organizational justice moderates the relationship between perceived organizational support and organizational commitment?
Significance of the Study
This research will contribute to the resolution of problems that many companies in Japan are facing. Companies with high turnover also face difficulties in human resource development, and the decline in the quality of human resources makes corporate management more difficult.
A decline in corporate competitiveness will lead to a decline in the quality of human resources within the nation and also cause future concerns about tax revenue.
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This study provided on how to retain the people by exploring the factors that encourage employee’s commitment towards the organization, especially how to promote the contributions of employees. By suggesting ways to reduce turnover, this study can help companies reduce the hiring and education costs that they have paid. Also, in Japan today, companies with a high turnover rate are given worse evaluations of society, and it makes it challenging to hire human resources. This study suggests that job seekers can highly evaluate companies by providing suggestions for achieving high retention rates.
Delimitation of the Study
Firstly, the delimitation of this research focused on clearing the relationships of perceived organizational support, organizational commitment and organizational justice in Japanese tenure employees only.
Secondly, all participants in this study are Japanese with a full-time job. With the above sampling procedure in this study, the results may not be generalized to other countries or regions, and also may not be applied to employees with other forms of employment.
Lastly, this study conducted only a quantitative approach, and the data were collected only by using responses that are based on self-assessment.
Definition of the Key Terms Perceived Organizational Support
Perceived organizational support is a global belief that employees have about how much the organization evaluates the contribution of employees and how well the organization cares about their well-being (Eisenberger et al., 1986).
Organizational Commitment
Organizational commitment refers to the psychological state of an employee that characterizes the relationship between the organization and the employee and implications for the decision to continue or keep membership in the organization. Organizational commitment has three sub-components: affective commitment (AC), continuous commitment (CC) and normative commitment (NC). Among these three components, AC was the most robustly
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correlated with turnover intention, while three components of organizational commitment were negatively correlated (Meyer & Allen, 1991).
Organizational Justice
The definitions of organizational justice (OJ) is “employee’s perceptions of fairness in organizations” (Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005, p.11). OJ is considered to consist of three aspects those are distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional or relational justice (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001; Colquitt, 2001).
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