Retention and productivity levels of a workforce are one of the essential ingredients for organisations to prosper in today's competitive business environment. Turnover intentions of the workforce are an important consideration for managers of organisations, employees, families, and communities alike. This study investigated a comprehensive model of turnover intentions that included two proximal variables, (job satisfaction, and organisational commitment), the distal variables of organisational justice, work strain, work overload, and work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict with the turnover intentions. A questionnaire was completed by 114 participants of the Allied Health workforce at the Waikato District Health Board, from allied health occupational groups, psychologists, physiotherapists, social workers, dieticians, and speech language therapists. Job satisfaction, affective commitment, distributive, interactional, and procedural justice, strain and family-to-work conflict were correlated with turnover intentions. Results of the mediated regression analyses found that job satisfaction and affective commitment are significant mediators between distributive, interactional, and procedural justice, work strain, and family work conflict with turnover intentions. The major implications from this research are that managers of organisation need to foster job satisfaction and affective commitment within their organisation to reduce turnover intentions. In the final chapter, the conclusions are discussed in terms of its practical implications to organisations, employees and the need for future research.

Research gap: Reputation is seen as an important asset for companies and can create competitive advantages. Within business-to-business the reputation of the company is argued to affect the relationship between buyers and suppliers and although the area is stressed to be important, it is still under-researched. Previous literature is not aligning when it comes to the importance of reputation and the duration of the relationship and it also states trust to have impact on important parts of the relationship, such as affective commitment and the willingness to invest. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis was to measure to what extent the duration of a buyer-supplier relationship affects trust, and to what extent trust affects the affective commitment and willingness to invest, when the reputation of the supplier was negative as the outcome of adverse publicity. Hypothesis: H1a; H1b: The duration of buyer-supplier relationship has a positive impact on Trust (integrity or benevolence) if the reputation of the supplier is negative H2a; H2b: Trust (integrity or benevolence) has a positive impact on affective Commitment, if the reputation of the supplier is negative H3a; H3b: Trust (integrity or benevolence) has a positive impact on willingness to invest if the reputation of the supplier is negative Method: The study had a quantitative approach and collected the data by a questionnaire sent to manufacturing business-to-business companies by email. 462 companies were contacted which resulted in 72 usable answers. Conclusion:The buyer-supplier relationship was not to a significantly extent affected by negative reputation and the duration of the relationship was not differing to a substantially extent. The different trust increased the buyers’ affective commitment and willingness to invest which demonstrates the importance of trust in the relationship due to negative reputation.

The stress-strain relationship has been the mainstream of the occupational stress research. The stressor-strain relationship is the very definition of occupational stress; stress in the work environment cause individual strain (e.g., anxiety, depression, and burnout). According to recent research, people tend to appraise stress as potentially promoting their personal growth and achievement (i.e., challenge stress) should be distinguished the stress from people tend to appraise stress as potentially constraining their personal development and work-related accomplishment (i.e., hindrance stress). These two types of stress are differentially associated with affective and behavioral responses. Moreover, the scholars argued that the next step for work stress research should move to investigating variables that moderate the stress, strain, and work outcomes relationship. Literature reviews show that numerous researches argued that job control is an important environmental moderator that has received special attention in the occupational stress literature. However, the moderating effects are much more inconsistent. As scholars suggested self-efficacy is a theoretically important attribute of individuals in job strain that is believed to have a stress-buffer effect of job control on psychological well-being. In other words, self-efficacy may have the conjunctive moderating effect with control on the relationship between stress, strain, and outcomes. The present research aims to study the relationship between challenge-hindrance stress, burnout and affective commitment, and the role of environment- and individual-related resources (i.e., job control, self-efficacy as possible conjunctive moderating factors between stress and its effects on burnout and affective commitment). The participants of this study were 435 governmental employees of the Customs Office. The data were collected as a two-wave study with a six-month time lag in order to diminish the effects of common method variance. The results demonstrated as follows: 1. Challenge stress is positively associated with emotional exhaustion, and does not significantly associate with cynicism and affective commitment. Hindrance stress is negatively associated with affective commitment, and does not significantly associate with burnout. 2. Job control has the moderating effect on the relationship between challenge stress, cynicism, and affective commitment. 3. Job control and self-efficacy played as the conjunctive moderators on the relationship between challenge stress and burnout.

The financial tsunami, being the most influential factor on economic changes,have led companies to undergo radical structure reformation, and forcing well-established companies to conduct unpaid leave policy. If worse, policy-makers will even downsize the organizations, and even high-tech companies cannot avoid this fate. The aim of the research is using individual-level study to see how Taiwanese high-tech employees and managers¡¦ attitudes toward organizational change and what impact they would cause on the affective commitments and consequently search for methods which will let organizational changes be perceived as positive events to all members. In addition, the study will clarify the relationship between psychological capital, organization-based self-esteem, attitudes toward organizational change and affective commitment. Furthermore, discussing how demographic variables influence these four main variables would be another contribution from the study. With effective samples of 319 high-tech employees and manager samples have proven that the psychological capital has both direct and indirect relationships with the affective commitments, on the other hand, organization-based self-esteem factor has neither. Moreover, the data indicates that ducation, managerial rank, job content and seniority are statically significant toward the main four variables.

Background: A successful organization is the one that recognizes the importance of its human element and take into account their commitment to ensure the attainment of its objectives. However, the focus into the study of commitment among workers is often directed towards for-profit organizations with NGOs receiving less attention. This HRM related issue accord several scholars, is said to be an important factor to be considered in order to ensure a successful organization be it for-profit or NGO. The issue of commitment among workers however tend to take several direction as the result of the multidimensional nature of organizations, hence the varying configurations of commitment mindset (Affective, Normative and Continuance) and the presence of various targets of commitment (e.g. organization, customers etc.) among workers. Aim: The aim of this thesis is to examine the commitment among workers in NGOs, by investigating the various targets of commitment among different categories of workers of NGOs in Sweden. The paper will further investigates whether the targets of commitment among the different categories of workers in NGOs differs and what influences these differences. Through the empirical cases, this thesis will provide appropriate guidance to ensure commitment among categories workers in NGOs and also contribute to previous research with regards to commitment among categories workers in NGOs. Methodology: The qualitative research approach was used in the conducting of this study. A dual case study was undertaken 12 semi-structured interviews with six from each case organization. Participants were drawn from the two main categories of workers in NGOs thus from volunteers and paid workers. Results: The conducted research study reveals there are differences in relations to the targets of commitment among the different categories of workers as well as thedisplay of the different types of commitment towards these targets. The guideline identified by this paper to ensure commitment among workers in NGOs should be a considerable amount of attention to workers development and recognition from the organization.

Masters of Commerce / Organizations are operating within a difficult economic environment and in the face of fierce world competition (George & Jones, 1992 cited in Ndlovu & Brijball Parumasur, 2005). To remain competitive globally and for economic reasons, Theron and Dodd (2011) postulate that organizations sporadically have to retrench workers. In order to reduce expenses as well as costs and losses to the organization, they have to restructure and reduce their headcount and the typical form of engaging in the restructuring is by means of downsizing. Makawatsakul and Kleiner (2003) posit that employee morale and loyalty tend to be the first unintended casualties of a downsizing strategy. The repercussions of downsizing is that it jeopardizes employees’ commitment and morale to a large extent (Muthuvuloo 8Rose, 2005) and survivors thus experience lower job and organizational satisfaction (Baruch & Hind, 2000) as this creates insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. Survivors are also often forced to make a sideway or downward move in their job, may experience a drop in pay and status, become stressed by the amount of work left by departing colleagues that they would now need to undertake and worry about the security of their new position in the organization (Chipunza & Berry 2010). In light of the above, the aim of the study was to investigate the organizational commitment of those employees who survived and remained with the retail organization following a downsizing process. For the purpose of this study a quantitative, non probability convenience sampling design was utilized. The sample (N=150) comprised of both males and females from different ethnic groups. A self developed biographical questionnaire and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) were used to gather data. Statistical analyses involved both descriptive and inferential statistics (the Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient, Multiple Regression Analysis and Analysis of Variance). The results of the study indicate that employees display below average levels of commitment to the organization. More specifically, a direct, positive relationship was found between normative and affective commitment. Furthermore, a statistically significant relationship was found between affective and continuance commitment. Statistically significant relationships were found between the biographical characteristics namely, tenure, gender and age, and organizational commitment. Limitations of the current study are put forth and recommendations are made with respect to future research and for the organization.

Magister Commercii (Industrial Psychology) - MCom(IPS) / Literature on turnover intentions revealed that various factors predict employee turnover intention. For higher education, the ongoing transformation that has been taking place has posed many challenges, one of them being the recruitment and retention of staff in academia. However, there is the notion that employees who experience sufficient support and acknowledgement from their supervisors are more likely to develop a sense of empowerment, thus helping in either creating or increasing feelings of commitment which could decrease turnover intentions.

Magister Commercii (Industrial Psychology) - MCom(IPS) / Robbins and Judge (2013, p. 13) define an organisation as a “consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.” Since an organisation’s effectiveness is the result of the level of individual and collective employee performance (i.e. teams and organisational units) and their success in attaining these shared goals, organisations have realised the potential of people as a source of competitive advantage (Pfeffer, 1994). The financial services industry has become fiercely competitive and is largely dependent on the collection of individuals working together to create the services that clients demand and are willing to pay for. South Africa has one of the best-developed financial sectors in the world and competition between the four major banks and insurance providers is fierce (Bhorat, Hirsch, Kanbur & Ncube, 2014). Since companies in the financial sector provide more or less the same services, they depend on their workers to transform scarce resources into valued services that clients demand.

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Prior work in the transformational leadership realm has focused primarily on relations among leader behaviors and various criteria such as subordinate satisfaction and effectiveness. This restrictive focus has limited the degree to which one of Bass's (1985a) central arguments can be directly assessed; namely, that optimally effective leaders engage in both transformational and transactional behaviors. In this study, an analytic technique known as the pattern approach was employed to effectively discern which particular pattern of leader behaviors was associated with the highest levels of subordinate satisfaction and commitment. In general, the most effective leaders used a combination of transformational (e.g., stimulating subordinates to think of old problems in new ways; presenting a charismatic and inspirational view of the future) and contingent reward (e.g., providing pay or promotions in exchange for effective subordinate performance) behaviors, coupled with a low level of passive management-by-exception behaviors (e.g., remaining uninvolved until problems emerge). These optimally effective leaders were generally more successful than leaders who used predominantly one (e.g., transformational or transactional) behavioral style. / Ph. D.