Fauziah Noordin

Career commitment in collectivist and individualist cultures: a comparative study

A comparative study of Malaysian and Australian managers used the Carson and Bedeian multidimensional career commitment measure and the individualism-collectivism scale developed by Singelis et al . (1995) in a survey to test the hypothesis that career commitment is likely to be higher in individualistic than in collectivistic cultures. Malaysian managers were more collectivistic but also more vertically individualistic than Australian managers, and the two groups differed only in their levels of career resilience commitment and were not significantly different in career identity and career planning commitment. These results may reflect a shift from collectivism towards individualism with Malaysias economic development, but collectivism may also be adapting to economic development and social change and the findings add weight to recent criticism of accepted conceptualizations of cultures.

Individualism-Collectivism and Job Satisfaction between Malaysia and Australia.

Purpose – One of the main issues that many organizations will face in the coming years is the management of increasing diversity in the workforce. The purpose of this paper is to examine the levels of individualism and collectivism of managers in two different cultural environments, that is, Malaysia and Australia.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected by questionnaire from middle managers in a total of 18 organisations in Malaysia and ten organisations in Australia. Individualism‐collectivism was measured using Singelis et al.s 32‐item scale. The items in the scale are designed to measure the horizontal and vertical aspects of individualism‐collectivism. The items were answered on seven‐point scale where 1 indicates strong disagreement and 7 indicates strong agreement. In addition, the seven‐item job satisfaction measure, which is part of the Survey of Organizations questionnaire developed by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, was used.Findings – The study reveal...

The Dynamic Role of Social Exchange and Personality in Predicting Turnover Intentions among Professional Workers

Abstract The dynamic role of fairness, trust and teamwork has strongly affected professionals’ attitude and behaviours that are commonly complex and uncontrolled. Separations between personality and professionals’ behaviour have led to poor social interaction activity within an organisation. This paper is aimed at discussing the impact of social exchange in predicting turnover intentions among professional workers and the mediating role of personality in this relationship. Clear and strong behavioural expectations among professional workers must engage with fair treatments on interactional, distribution and procedures. Organisational trust formed the central focus on integrity between employee-employer where professional workers perceived that the ethical practises should be in place. Teamwork develops high commitment among team members and a two-way communication encourages feedback, clear job expectations and sustains long term relationships. Professional workers’ openness to experience value helps in the freedom to create new ideas, innovation and create new experience for career development. The propositions were developed to explain the relationship between social exchange and personality in predicting professional workers’ turnover intentions. Based on several limitations, there would therefore seem to be a definite need for conducting an empirical study to link between social exchange and turnover intentions among specific or combination professional occupations such as engineers, doctors, architects, accountants and lawyers. The need to conduct a qualitative study is to prove the most important dimensions used to predict actual turnover intentions among professional workers, whilst a quantitative method is employed to examine the impact among variables based on the developed research model.

Work - Family Conflict and Stress: Evidence from Malaysia

The objective of this study is to investigate the influence of work family conflict among the employs of a semi-government organization in East Malaysia. This study has adopted the Workplace scale that was developed by Tate, Whatley, and Clugston (1997) scale in order to measure the effect of work family conflict and the stress level among the employees. The results indicate that the employees appear to have lower level of work - family conflict and lower level of job stress. It is recommended that future research should focus on employees in other organizations both in public and private organizations. The findings of such studies would aid management of these organizations to further understand the effect of work-family conflict and stress among their employees.

Islamic work ethics (IWE) towards the organizational commitment

The study investigates the implication of Islamic work ethics (IWE) towards the organizational commitment and the moderating impact of job involvement. IWE is analogous to the concept of Islam that emphasizes cooperation in work, and consultation is seen as a way of overcoming obstacles and avoiding mistakes to meet ones needs and establish equilibrium in ones individual and social life. IWE is examined on how far the employees practicing what they have claims to be for the organization The result will determine impact of the implementation of Islamic work ethic and the employee commitment towards the organization. Other than that it will determine the understanding of the Islamic work ethics from the employee perspective. This research will help the management to determine the understanding of the employee towards Islamic work ethics and to measure the element in Islamic work ethics that lead to the organizational commitment.

Learning Organization Culture, Organizational Performance and Organizational Innovativeness in a Public Institution of Higher Education in Malaysia: A Preliminary Study

Abstract The existence of learning organization culture has been proven to influence growth and development of an organization. This study explores the level of learning organization culture and its associations with organizational performance, and organizational innovativeness among academics in a Public Institution of Higher Education in Malaysia (PIHE). Statistical results obtained from 40 academics indicate significant positive associations between all variables. Continuous learning was found to be the highest correlated with organizational performance while collaboration and team learning was found to be highly associated with organizational innovativeness. Detail of results, implications of study, and future research are discussed.

Moderator Influences on Individualism-collectivism and Career Adaptability among ICT Professionals in Malaysia☆

Abstract Career adaptability has been identified as one of the skills needed for individual who works in ICT industry due to fast and consistent technological upgrading. Individualism-collectivism has been studied by many researchers in cross-cultural to assess certain research constructs including work behaviours. This study assessed whether the relationship between the culture constructs and career adaptability is significant, and whether several demographic characteristics have moderating effect on the relationship using structural equation modelling (SEM). It was found that only horizontal individualism, vertical individualism, and horizontal collectivism has positive relationships with career adaptability. Among several demographic characteristics tested, only age and position level has moderating influences on the relationships. Implications of the research are discussed and suggestion for future studies is included at the end of the study.

Translation and an Adaptation of Work-Related Attitude Questionnaire in Cross-Cultural Survey Research

The purpose of this paper is to briefly discuss the techniques and process of translation instrument. Several issues that were found during the translation course were also highlighted in this paper. As suggested by past studies, a combination of few techniques and approaches to translation were utilized in this study. Several qualified bilingual and bicultural experts were involved in this study. In order to assess the accuracy, suitability, and comprehensibility of the translated instrument, several lay experts were also employed. A total of 16 items of job involvement questionnaire (JIQ) were used in this study. This study suggests that as more techniques and methods were used together, the risk of items that are not equivalent could be reduced. For future research, this study would like to recommend the use of multiple techniques and procedures on translation research.

Individual Entrepreneurial Orientation and Talent Retention of Engineers: A Pilot Survey

Solving a crucial shortage of engineers in the internal labour market and a turnover cost are the major concerns to reassess a strong determination of engineers’ behavioural expectations towards current employment. A recent retention problem occurred when organisations rarely highlighted engineers as intrapreneurs. Consequently, engineers’ entrepreneurial behaviours are slowly undebated and limited action has been taken to assess individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) to predict years that remain among talented engineers. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess the items used for IEO in predicting retention outcome (intention to stay) among Malaysian engineers in manufacturing companies. This study adopted IEO and talent retention (intention to stay) items and a survey that recruited 110 engineers based on convenience sampling technique. Participants were recruited from various manufacturing companies located in Malaysia. Strong evidence was found that innovativeness (0.766), proactiveness (0.793), risk-taking (0.830) and autonomy (0.884) items were reliable (>0.70) for predicting the engineers’ intention to stay (0.879). Developing engineers with IEO behaviours and organisations can closely monitor the mobility of engineers to other jobs. The links between IEO and talent retention interpret a better solution to meet engineers’ career orientations and positive behavioural intentions.

Happiness Index Measurement: Application of Kansei Engineering and Positive Psychology

This paper discusses how to measure happiness from subjective worker’s emotion in one’s work environment. It is one of the most important and fundamental problems for positive psychology to measure happiness. In positive psychology study, many of scientific and experimental methods have been proposed as happiness testing or questionnaires. The methods are however depending on specific fields, test groups, and purposes of the measurement. The main issue of this paper is to illustrate the objective method by using factor analysis from subjective data of given basic questionnaires. The method is testing by actual data from a case study of workers’ happiness. The robustness is confirmed from the testing data by multidimensional analysis.