Interplay of personal characteristics antecedents and organisational antecedents in driving employee commitment

Abstract

The paper investigates how personal characteristics antecedents and organisational antecedents integrate to determine employee commitment (EC) in the Electricity Company of Ghana. By so doing, we depart from the predominant approaches to the study of EC which focus on a single set of antecedents, and to establish the need for combining the two. A survey study, we used questionnaire to collect primary data from 120 directors, managers and employees of the company. Data were presented in tabular format using frequencies and percentages, and cross-analysed the two sets of antecedents to ascertain their extent of integration in driving EC. We found that integrating both sets of antecedents reveals the critical role of employees’ personal characteristics in influencing the organisational antecedents to cause commitment, and a table is constructed to demonstrate this. We recommend application of both sets of antecedents, simultaneously, to better explain how and why employees are committed to organisations