The Impact of Job Attitudes on Private Correctional Staff's Continuance and Affective Organizational Commitment

Abstract

Personnel are critical to the success of any security organization, and this is especially true of private prisons. Therefore, it is essential to understand how their organizational commitment is affected by workplace factors. There are two major forms of organizational commitment, continuance and affective. To examine how the salient workplace factors of job stress, job involvement, and job satisfaction were related to the continuance and affective commitment of personnel working for a private prison, data from a survey of personnel at a maximum security private prison were examined. Two ordinary least squares regression equations were run with continuance and affective commitment as the dependent variables. The amount of variance explained between the two regression equations was noticeably different. A larger percentage of the variance was accounted for in the affective commitment regression equation as compared to the continuance commitment multivariate analysis. Moreover, job stress had a positive association with continuance commitment, and a nonsignificant relationship with affective commitment. Job involvement had a nonsignificant effect on continuance commitment and a positive effect on affective commitment. Job satisfaction had a negative impact on continuance commitment and a positive relationship with affective commitment. Overall, the results support the contention that the two commitment measures are not affected similarly by job stress, involvement, and satisfaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Private correctional staff
• organizational commitment
• job stress
• job involvement
• job satisfaction
• private security personnel