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Article Excerpt
An old saw about productivity goes along the lines of "90% of success is just showing up." Nowhere is this truer than when one considers the role of employee attendance at work. If employees don't "show up," whether on a temporary basis via absenteeism or permanently by way of turnover, then "success" (i.e., productivity) is negatively impacted. The exorbitant costs of this withdrawal behavior have been well-chronicled in the management literature (e.g., "Cost of Lost Productivity," 2000; Johnson, 2000; Steers and Porter, 1991). Thus, it is not surprising that ways to motivate employee attendance and retention have been widely studied in academic research (e.g., Branham, 2006; Markham and McKee, 1995; Renstch and Steel, 1998). Another form of not "showing up" occurs when the employee, though physically present, because of various psychological states (dissatisfaction with the job, supervisor, coworkers, etc.), is "absent" from the job from a mental standpoint (e.g., Zellars et al., 2004). This mental disconnect, in combination with literal absence, constitute a detachment from the organization (i.e., a lack of attachment to the organization).
The benefits of organizational commitment as an employee attachment phenomenon are without serious dispute. From an attitudinal perspective, organizational commitment has been described as
the relative strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization, which is characterized by belief in and acceptance of organizational values, willingness to exert effort on behalf of the organization, and a desire to maintain membership in the organization (Mowday et al., 1982: 27).
Research on employees' commitment to their organizations has established a positive relationship between commitment and organizationally-desired outcomes such as job satisfaction (Bateman and Strasser, 1984) and work attendance (Mathieu and Zajac, 1990). Similarly, organizational commitment has been found to have an inverse correlation with both absenteeism and turnover (Cotton and Tuttle, 1986).
Another construct that shares theoretical ground with organizational commitment is employee engagement. Although myriad definitions exist for employee engagement (Finn and Rock, 1997), most contain either implicit or explicit implications that employee engagement involves "the expression of the self through work and other employee-role activities" (Jones and Harter, 2005: 78; see also Kahn, 1990; May et al., 2004; Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004). One similarity between organizational commitment and employee engagement is that both capture some aspect of "employee[s'] perceptions of themselves, their work, and their organization" (Harter et al., 2002: 269). In addition, like organizational commitment, employee engagement is a positive correlate of job satisfaction (Mount et al., 2000) and a negative correlate of turnover (Jones and Harter, 2005; Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004). A key conceptual distinction between the two, though, is that the attitudinal experience of commitment occurs apart from, or as a consequence of the day-to-day, routine work activities employees regularly engage in (Jones and Harter, 2005). Employee engagement, on the other hand, being expressed "through work and other employee-role activities," is a construct more directly tied to the interactive component of an employee's work experience, particularly with managers and co-workers, and in fact more immediately determines whether those work activities will take place (Jones and Harter, 2005). Engagement, like commitment, has an affective component encompassing "people's emotional reactions to conscious and unconscious phenomena," but it also is centered in "the objective properties of jobs, roles, and work context ...--all within the same moments of task performance" (Kahn, 1990: 693). So, while affect-based connection to organizations has been associated with desired workplace behavior (Costigan et al., 1998), engagement may be a more valuable measure of the role of attachment to the workplace on important outcomes.
One aspect of the potential role of employee engagement that merits greater investigation is the changing nature of the demographic makeup of the workplace. Several years now into the period once prospectively characterized as "Workforce 2000," the predictions of a great increase in demographic diversity in U.S. workplaces, particularly with regard to race and ethnicity, have become manifest. Accompanying that change is a need to re-examine the dynamics of how employees process work life through the prism of their racial/ethnic identity and how that processing might affect their attachment to their organizations.
Race is a salient component of how U.S. workers view their experiences in the workplace. For example, Dixon and her associates presented findings of a study of university workers, showing that African American and Hispanic workers believe themselves to be discriminated against and treated unfairly in the workplace as compared to their white counterparts (Dixon et al., 2002). In their study of organizational citizenship behavior of hospital workers, Jones and Schaubroeck (2004) found that nonwhite employees reported lower levels of both job satisfaction and coworker social support than did their white colleagues. In addition to academic literature, government-based data support the notion of race-based disparate workplace perceptions, such as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report which asserted that "from [the] white perspective, employment discrimination targeting black Americans is no longer a serious problem in the United States" (Cose, 1993: 2), a finding in direct contradiction to one nationwide poll in which adult blacks, by a nearly two-to-one margin, perceived racism in the workplace to be a greater problem than did white adults (Cose, 1999).
Although there are many individual research results supporting the salience of race in the workplace, a concurrent contradictory phenomenon operates in research featuring race as a primary independent variable. In this case, a propensity exists to understate, or exclude entirely, race as a central component of organizational life (Nkomo, 1992), or to ignore the "fine-grained ... differences" in how members of different race groups process their experiences in their companies (McKay et al., 2007). When race is given a focal role in organizational research, it is often framed in a broad, binary fashion, as in comparisons between "Whites" and "Blacks/African Americans," or between "Whites" and "Non-Whites" (Cox and Nkomo, 1990), which may overlook the distinctions between and within race groups (especially "minority" ones).
Sometimes such practices, as in the case of combining all racial minorities into a catch-all "Non-White" category, arise from practical realities, for example when discrete categorization isn't possible due to an insufficient numbers of respondents. However, perhaps more common is the case that researchers commit a conscious "sin of omission" in their theoretical frameworks when examining race (Nkomo, 1992). With that in mind, it becomes necessary to reconsider our understanding of whether and how attachment processes operate differentially for different race groups, and whether and how those processes lead to different outcomes for those groups.
In this article, we first hypothesize and test on an overall basis the impact of employee attachment (as measured by employee engagement) on a precursor of withdrawal behavior (perceived discrimination), actual withdrawal behavior (days of work missed), and a withdrawal predictor (intent to remain). We then investigate whether and how these dynamics occur for four different race groups--Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. (1)
HYPOTHESES
Perceived Discrimination
Discrimination in the workplace is still a problem in the United States, as indicated by claims submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). According to one legal counsel for the EEOC, discrimination claims centering on race "are the leaders" among all claims, a situation that hasn't changed much over time (Hastings, 2007). Although some overt racial discrimination still occurs even into the 21st Century, much of the race discrimination claims received by the EEOC involve more subtle, "hidden bias" (Hastings, 2007). Accordingly, such discrimination would fall most precisely in the realm of perceived discrimination (as opposed to demonstrated, or proven bias). As mentioned earlier, there is much evidence that African Americans and Hispanic employees perceive themselves to be discriminated against in the workplace to a much greater degree than do their white co-workers (McKay et al., 2007). A reasonable foundation for these perceptions could relate to the tendency of human beings to engage in "oppositional identity" (Fine, 1994), or the process by which people "define [themselves], [their] identities, in opposition to, or as distinct from, others" (Gentile, 1996: 14). Although identity-based self-categorization can have beneficial outcomes (Rosenberg and Trevino, 2003), the practice can become problematic when "my sense of myself is built upon my ability to distinguish myself from you; therefore I value the ways in which I am different from you; therefore I begin to devalue the traits that make you distinct from me" (Gentile, 1996: 14). As played out...
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