The effects of employee and country characteristics on employment commitment in Europe

ABSTRACT

This article aims to explain variation in employment commitment among employees in Europe with individual- and country-level factors. Country-level factors refer to cultural, institutional and macroeconomic factors, while individual-level factors refer to characteristics of employees and their current jobs. The cultural, institutional and macroeconomic approaches have rarely been taken account of when studying the employment commitment of employees. The data are based on Round 5 of the European Social Survey, collected in 2010 (N = 26 countries and N = 18,064 employees) and analyzed by means of a multilevel regression analysis. Results indicate that being female, having a higher tertiary education, displaying a high level of job discretion, perceiving low job insecurity and perceiving one’s pay as adequate increased employment commitment. Of the country-level factors only the economic prosperity of a country, measured by Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, positively affected employment commitment. The GNI seemed to explain the relationship between country-level self-transcendence values and employment commitment.

KEYWORDS:

• Employment commitment
• cultural factors
• European Social Survey
• institutional factors
• multilevel regression analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes on contributors

Teemu Turunen is currently working on his post-doctoral research in which he examines the change in individuals’ work orientations over time and the factors related to work orientations of individuals on many different levels.

Jouko Nätti is Professor of Social Policy in the University of Tampere, Finland. His research interests include working life research, the relations of work to time and place, forms of employment, labor market policy, segmentation, unemployment, work and household, job insecurity, knowledge work and gender and age at work.

Notes

1 Schwartz has in fact two theories of values, which may confuse some readers of his texts. The first theory deals with the basic values of individuals on which individuals in all cultures differ. The second theory is a theory of cultural values or cultural dimensions on which societies differ (Schwartz 2011). This second theory is applied in this article.

2 The effects of Schwartz’s four higher-order values on the employment commitment of employees were also tested on the individual level, that is, these values were measured on the level of individuals. However, the results did not reach statistical significance (estimates not shown).

3 Multicollinearity checks indicated that there is no reason to suspect considerable multicollinearity among the country-level variables, since the VIF (Variance Inflation Factor) scores were below 4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Finnish Work Environment Fund (Työsuojelurahasto) [grant numbers 113352,114441].