ROLE OF QUALITY OF WORK LIFE IN DETERMINING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT IN TELECOM INDUSTRY

International Journal for Quality Research 13(2) 285–300 ISSN 1800-6450 Jolly Sahni 1 Article info: Received 19.08.2018. Accepted 02.02.2019. UDC – 005.331/332 DOI – 10. 24874/IJQR13.02-03 ROLE OF QUALITY OF WORK LIFE IN DETERMINING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT IN TELECOM INDUSTRY Abstract: The value that Quality of work life (QWL) brings to the workplace has long been established by several scholars, however, the impact of QWL on engagement and commitment levels of employees remains under investigated. The present empirical study is devoted to explore the quality of work life in telecom industry and examine its association with employee engagement and organization commitment. The data collected from a random sample of 312 employee working in Telecom industry of Saudi Arabia, was analysed through Descriptive statistics and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Evidence supports the significant relationship of quality of work life and organizational commitment, however, there is a weak link of quality of work life with employee engagement. This is the first study to explore the relationship among three important constructs of workplace; quality of work life, organizational commitment and employee engagement. Therefore, the study significantly contributes to the extant literature on Quality of work life. Keywords: Quality of work life, Employee engagement, Organizational commitment, Job satisfaction, work-life balance 1. Introduction Given the challenges of globalization, diversification, advancement in technology, frequent changes in employee attitude, organizations need to create a niche and succeed in the dynamic business environment. In this scenario, the human capital of organization is one of the few resources which can provide a competitive advantage to the organization in the form of committed and engaged employees. In order to have high performance level from employees, organizations are accountable to provide support to the employees at work. Furthermore, there is an all-round demand for 1 developing the humanized job which can satisfy employee’s higher needs, employ their higher skills and make them better employees, spouses and parents. This demand for redesigning has come to be known as Quality of Work Life, which embraces significant aspects of work including the work environment, monetary compensation for work, hours of work, scope of progression, benefits, welfare services etc. There is a strong need to replace the traditional job design with more enriched job designs which provide flexibility to the employees. The importance of QWL has been comprehended in various studies (Martel & Corresponding author: Jolly Sahni Email: 285 Dupuis, 2006; Sahni, 2017). The human resources of any organization are critical to achieve the goals and therefore, human resource policies and practices must have a strategic approach (Allui & Sahni, 2016). Past studies indicate the positive relationship of job satisfaction with quality of work life (Koonmee et al., 2010; Noor & Abdullah 2012). Similarly, Drobnic et al., (2010) propose that employees who have secure jobs would feel comfortable at the work place having a positive impact on their quality of life. Low quality of work life may affect the quality of services and organizational commitment as a whole. Therefore, Quality of work life may be considered as an umbrella term including job satisfaction, working conditions, opportunity for continuous growth, work life balance, stress management at work, social relationships, organizational culture and communication. Considering the different industries, telecom is one of the fastest growing and dynamic industries, which is considered to be demanding and stressful for employees due to the long working hours. The telecom industry is facing a transformation in the technology and services, which therefore challenges the telecom employees to work faster, more effectively, and efficiently. This requires the industry to be more vigilant and proactive in improving the quality of work life of their employees, which could help them, focus on work and adapt to the changes quickly. Another important factor in the workplace is employee engagement which is a desirable workplace behavior known to produce positive outcomes. Researchers have explored the outcome of increased employee engagement like higher productivity, performance and commitment (Saks, 2006; Christian et al., 2011; Bailey et al., 2017; Bakker & Albrecht, 2018). As a predictor of employee engagement, past studies have tested job characteristics, perceived organizational support, procedural and distributive justice. However, no study so far have linked quality of work life with the 286 important workplace attitude; employee engagement. Moreover, literature on QWL in the context of Saudi Arabia is limited because several studies are commonly related with only job satisfaction and in most of the studies, it is not clear how quality of work life of employees influences their engagement levels and organizational commitment. Therefore, the role of quality of work life as an antecedent to employee engagement and organizational commitment remains under investigated. Against this backdrop, the present empirical study explores the complex relationship between the three constructs; quality of work life, employee engagement and organizational commitment. Therefore, the study aims to achieve the following objectives: 1) To assess the perceived quality of work life among the telecom Industry employees. 2) To investigate the relationship of quality of work life and organizational commitment. 3) To study the relationship of quality of work life and employee engagement. The remainder of paper is organized into four sections. Section two summarizes the review of relevant literature. Section three presents research methods while section four discusses the findings, section five concludes the paper with implications and area of future research. Introduction should provide a review of recent literature and sufficient background information to allow the results of the paper to be understood and evaluated. It should clearly explain the nature of the problem, previous work, purpose and contribution of the paper. 2. Review of literature The literature review is covered in four sections which presents the past research on quality of work life (QWL), organizational commitment (OC) and employee engagement J.Sahni (EE). The last part briefly reviews the relationship studies conducted on these three constructs. 2.1. Quality of worklife ‘Quality of work-life’ refers to the favourableness or non-favourableness of a total job environment for the employees. The contribution of Walton (1973), Herzberg et al., (1959), Sirgy et al., (2001) and many others have paved the way for the development of new concepts and experimental process and thus evolved as the building blocks for Quality of work life (QWL). Through QWL programs orga (...truncated)