Organisational commitment and job embeddedness of critical and scarce services staff.

Abstract

In the light of the global skills shortage, the retention of staff with critical and scarce skills has become a top priority. The objective of this study was to empirically investigate the relationship between such employees’ organisational commitment (measured by the Organisational Commitment Questionnaire) and their job embeddedness (measured by the Job Embeddedness Scale). It also attempted to establish whether gender, race, marital status, tenure and job level groups differ significantly regarding these variables in the South African context. A cross-sectional survey design was used to collect data from a purposive sample of N = 206 staff members identified as possessing critical and scarce skills in a South African medical and IT services company. Descriptive, correlational and inferential statistics were applied to achieve the objectives. The participants showed a high level of affective and continuance commitment with regard to their perceived job embeddedness. The results also confirmed that the biographical groups differed significantly in terms of the variables. The results are of importance for managers interested in retaining staff that have been identified as having critical and scarce skills and could provide valuable pointers for the design of effective human resource retention strategies.