Employee Commitment - Essay Example

These approaches all recognize the importance of commitment, as opposed to compliance, as the most effective route to productivity. A simple way to think about these changes is that pressures from both the product market and the labor market are now taken inside the company and brought to bear on individual employees (Knights and Wilmott, 2007). The more traditional employee relationship buffered employees from market forces, the new relationship is mediated much more powerfully by the market.

For workers, these developments represent a new psychological contract at work, a new set of implicit expectations between employer and employee. Perhaps the most important part of the traditional psychological contract at work was employee commitment to the organization, which developed in part in return for employer offerings such as job security and other protections from the variability of employment associated with outside markets (Daft, 2007). When employers backed away from their traditional obligations and offered nothing new in return, employee commitment collapsed.

How employers will operate with sharply lower employee commitment is an important issue, especially given that they have moved toward work systems that demand greater commitment through greater autonomy and reduced supervision. ConclusionThe organizational performance does not appear to have suffered from declining employee commitment and morale, in large part because threats of continued layoffs and comparisons with other workers who have lost their jobs have restrained employees from acting out their frustrations.

At the moment, then, the psychological contract at work is something like a spot market where workers are encouraged to focus on their immediate self-interest, and employers promise to do the same. In order to develop a new psychological contract include making relations with employees more contractual, with contingent pay and more clearly defined performance outcomes (Knights a Wilmott, 2007). These efforts will come with their own costs, however, including the inevitable increase in litigation associated with any contractual relationship.