تعهد سازمانی در زمان جنگ : ارزیابی تاثیر و تضعیف حساسیت کارمند به تعارض قومی سیاسی

We examine organizational commitment in foreign-invested and indigenous firms located in an operating environment characterized by ethnopolitical conflict and its violent manifestations of civil war and terrorism. Drawing on the management, psychology, and political science literature streams, we investigate whether employee sensitivity to ethnopolitical conflict contributes to explaining organizational commitment in a violent operating environment. The results of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that employee sensitivity to ethnopolitical conflict is inversely related to organizational commitment and has explanatory power beyond the traditional predictors of organizational commitment. Further, perceived organizational support is found to attenuate the negative relationship between employee sensitivity to ethnopolitical conflict and organizational commitment in foreign-invested firms but not in indigenous firms. The data suggest that an operating environment beset with violent ethnopolitical conflict may exact an indirect cost on the firm through lowered employee commitment, and that foreign-invested firms through a ‘foreignness advantage’ can manage this potential cost by maintaining a high level of perceived organizational support among their employees. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Organizational commitment continues to garner interest among scholars and practitioners alike because it holds the promise of enhanced employee performance in complex operating environments (Gregersen and Black, 1992 and Taylor et al., 2008). Complex operating environments are generally construed as those with intricate organizational linkages and relationships set within and across a multitude of political, economic, legal and socio-cultural milieu (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989). The complexity of the global operating environment, compounded with the pressures of global competition, call for a maximization of employee performance. This is said to require employee identification with organizational values and goals, and employee effort toward achieving those goals (Taylor et al., 2008). These are hallmarks of organizational commitment. Numerous studies have been conducted on the personal, job, and organizational predictors and correlates of organizational commitment (e.g., Cook et al., 1981, Meyer and Allen, 1997 and Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002). By contrast, the firm's external operating environment as a possible influence on employee commitment has received scant attention, with existing studies mainly focused on the socio-cultural environment (Gregersen and Black, 1992). Taylor et al. (2008) point out the need to consider the effect of negative forces in the global operating environment that may pose a challenge to gaining and maintaining organizational commitment. Turbulent change in the operating environment has been associated with such challenge (Dessler, 1999). Violent conflict can be deemed a negative, turbulent force in the operating environment (Getz and Oetzel, 2010 and Oetzel et al., 2007). Ethnopolitical conflict, large-scale conflict between ethnic groups, is a leading cause of violence and instability around the world (Carter et al., 2009). In its manifestations of war and terrorism, ethnopolitical conflict can disrupt lives and business activities, endanger people and assets, and instill fear and anxiety in the populace (Chirot, 2001, Esman, 2004 and Horowitz, 2000). We propose that an employee's sensitivity to these negative environmental forces could impact his or her commitment to the work organization. Employee emotions in the workplace have been examined in terms of responses to workplace violence and other phenomena internal to the organization (Barling, 1996, Leather et al., 1998 and LeBlanc and Kelloway, 2002), but less is known about how employees may respond emotionally to violent events outside the organization and what those emotional responses might mean for employee attitudes toward the organization (Mainiero and Gibson, 2003 and Ryan et al., 2003). Our goal in this paper is threefold: 1) to investigate whether employee sensitivity to ethnopolitical conflict (ESEC) external to the firm contributes to explaining organizational commitment beyond well-established predictors of organizational commitment; 2) to examine whether perceived organizational support, that is, the support given to employees by a firm's leadership, serves to moderate the relationship between ESEC and organizational commitment, and 3) to assess firm ownership effects. While several studies have emerged on the effects of terrorism on workplace attitudes (Alexander, 2004, Byron and Peterson, 2002, Mainiero and Gibson, 2003 and Ryan et al., 2003), and on employee commitment in the context of war (Messarra and Karkoulian, 2008, Reichel and Neumann, 1993 and Vinokur et al., 2011), this is the first study to our knowledge that empirically investigates the relationship between ESEC and organizational commitment, the organizational factors within management control that might moderate that relationship, and the differential effects of firm ownership. We proceed with a review of the literature on ethnopolitical conflict and the psychological response to terrorism. Hypotheses are developed in the subsequent sections on organizational commitment and firm ownership effects. Research methods are then described, and results are analyzed. We conclude with implications for research and international management practice.

The complexity and competiveness of the global operating environment call for a maximization of employee performance. The results of this study suggest that an operating environment beset with ethnopolitical conflict may exact an indirect cost on the firm through lowered employee commitment, and by extension lowered employee performance. However, as the results also show, foreign firms operating in such an environment have an opportunity to manage this potential cost, at least to some extent, by maintaining high perceived organizational support among their employees. The challenges posed by pervasive ethnic strife in the global operating environment make it imperative for managers to understand the wider ethnopolitical environment, how it plays out inside the organization, and the managerial interventions they have under their control that may attenuate its negative effects on employee attitudes.