The Impact of Organizational Commitment ( OC ) on the Intention to Leave ( ITL ) among the Academicians in Higher Educational Institutions ( HEIs ) in Pakistan

The commitment of academicians is incredibly significant for an academic institution. Once the employee’s commitment diminishes, the institution could face the challenge of complexity in retaining them. Organizational commitment (OC) is becoming an increasingly significant issue in competitive educational environment of higher education institutions (HEIs). The core objective of this “Review Article” is to inspect whether there is any relationship between both or not? How to decrease the ITL of employees is a key confront for HEIs. To survive in highly competitive educational settings, institutions are centering on how to take advantage of its human capital. The degree to which faculty members in fact dwells on their lower commitment and leave their institutions is an empirical query, but the institutions would help from a better understanding of what contributes to faculty’s decision to leave. The foremost idea of this study is to propose a new framework based on literature that gives emphasis on reducing the intention to leave among the academicians in the HEIs. The review of the related literature provides the basis for the “theoretical framework” upon which the research model stands. This study examines the relationship of OC as independent variable and the ITL as the dependent variable. Employee’s voluntary switchover incurs serious sum of cost for an institution. As a result it is important to identify ITLs as early as possible in order to enable the administrators to plan and implement courses of action.


INTRODUCTION
Pakistan is a developing country striving hard to develop its socio-economic sectors.It is an accredited fact that only the education can provide a solid foundation in this regard.In turn, the HEIs can play a very prominent role in the uplift of the educational standards.In Pakistan, the number of highly qualified and experienced teachers is not proportional to the needs of the HEIs.The criterion furnished by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) is also too strict to be followed.The problem of short fall in the qualified teachers is further aggravated by the phenomenon of ITL.The pivot of the whole phenomenon rests upon the commitment level of the employee towards his/her institution.The OC among the employee is highly effective upon the academic and economic status of the institution.It is observed that the downward trend in the commitment level induces ITL.Consequently, the concerned institution has to carry the academic and economic burdens.Therefore, the factors behind the ITL should be studied and analyzed on priority basis to reduce the rate of switchover among the employees.In this study, the causes and implications of the ITL are discussed in the light of the available literature.
Around the globe, the institutions have become more conscious that capable, competent and dedicated employees exploit the organization for healthier pay packages at least amount of workload.As, they know that human skills is the huge competitive lead for the institutions.In developing countries skillful employees are psychologically and economically captured from their competitors with high packages to compete the industry and lots of times they succeeded to yoke the organizations with the stakeholders.To manage, the recruitment and selection "right man on right job", the conduct of employees, job activities record, performance information, stimulus tricks and dismissals are the general practices of human resource management in any developed institution.Such like practices give confidence to the employees to acquire superior employment opportunities.How the academician's intention to leave can be bargain is a big challenge for many institutions (Malik et al., 2011).
Lots of institutions are in front of major challenges resulting in the restructuring and downsizing or rightsizing.The need for factors that predict organizational commitment has become more critical.Among the factors that could direct to strong organizational environment, augmented self-esteem, enthusiasm and output is the organizational commitment.One characteristic of employee and organization linkages that has received wide concentration from both the administrators and the behavioral scientists is the perception of employee commitment (Mowday et al., 1979).In addition, it is assumed that OC reflects one side of the mutual connection between the employer and the employee and in isolation both party has to participate its role.Organizations require committed employees in turn to face the global economic rivalry (Salami, 2008).A great deal of research has been conducted that attempts to linkage employee attitudes (OC) with behavioral factors intention to leave (ITL).In fact, OC plays an essential role in the switchovers literature.Organizational commitment has been measured as one of the most significant predictors of ITL.Employee switchovers correspond to a serious crisis to institutions in terms of loss of faculty, further employment and retraining costs (Malik et al., 2011;irfan et al., 2013).
Switchover is together a blessing and a curse for institutions.Switchover brings in the institutions, the fresh, new hires, often at a lower cost.On the other side, searches are costly too and often the faculties who leave are those the institution would prefer to maintain.This studies have attempt to identify what is significant to faculty members in order to make clear their intention to leave and what is the role of OC in reducing the ITL (Linda & Johnsrud, 2002).Organizational traditions, objective orientation and performances are predicted as job satisfaction while job satisfaction is an important predictor of OC and OC is the predictor of employee's ITL (Joo & Park, 2002).Commitment is a "psychosomatic bond" in which employers are typically guaranteed long time loyalty and commitment to the organization in the outcome thereof for providing the faculty's job security, opportunities for promotion, training and development (Gul et al., 2012).This study is an effort to formulate strategies for behavioral intention of the employees towards job switchover to survive with the existing rapidity of the globe.The aim of this article is to investigate the impact of OC on employee's ITL.

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT (OC)
Regardless of the lack of agreement on the different meaning, conceptualizations and dimensions, a general argument is common across all these divergences, that organizational commitment is well thought-out to be a link or association or bond of the individual with the organization.Organizational commitment is defined as a psychosomatic state that distinguishes the employee's association with the organization with its implications for the decision to carry on attachment to the organization.In the 3-D model of commitment, there are three "mind sets" in which each describes an employee's commitment to the organization.Affective commitment refers to employees' perception of the touching connection or recognition with the organization.Continuance commitment refers to employees' awareness of the cost of leaving the organization to a new setting.Normative commitment is the employees' perception of their normal obligation or the sense of loyalty to the organization (Meyer & Allen, 1997).
The achievement or breakdown of any academic institution extremely depends upon its academicians.Though, there are a few other characteristics that perform main functions, such as it is essential for the institutions to have competent employees in orientation to uphold them economically leading and aggressive in the institution.In reference to keep hold of such valuable commodity, the institutions should be aware regarding the organizational commitment and maintenance of the employees.As a result, commitment, mutually with experienced employees, looks to be of decisive significance for an institution to get competitive benefit and to enhance their performances (Salami, 2008).To a little extent, institutions made the false impression that the employees are just looking for economic reward from their jobs.These suppositions neglect the high implication that many employees reside on the intrinsic benefits of their job.As a result, this is not related to employee's job satisfaction and retention rather has undesirable effects on the institution too (Jehanzeb et al., 2013;Irfan et al., 2013).

Types of Organizational Commitment
Organizational commitment, in this study, is viewed as a three dimensional construct.

Affective commitment (AC)
Affective commitment is "when the employee identifies with a particular organization and its objectives in order to continue relationship to make possible these objectives" (Mowday et al., 1979).AC refers to an employee's emotional attachment to, recognition with and contribution in an organization described by acceptance of the organizational standards and by enthusiasm to stay with the organization.Well-built affective commitment refers that individuals desire to continue in an organization and they believe its aim and objectives (Moncarz et al., 2009).It is perceived that employees, who are affectively committed, continue working with great reliability on voluntary basis.Employees who are committed to their organization will have a strong ambition to continue as member of a particular organization.Employees who have strong affective commitment will be more expected to remain more contented in the organization because they want to be so (Malik et al., 2011).The employee feels that organization is loyal to them that build their commitment.The AC enhanced by supporting consciousness of the organizational values and standards.When employees are committed to their jobs, they will not leave their job that will reduce the ITL (Ashar et al., 2013;Irfan et al., 2013).

Continuance commitment (CC)
Continuance commitment refers to an understanding of the costs linked to leaving an organization.Individuals' linkage to the organization is based on the faith that they require to do so.CC can build up as a consequence of any event that enhances the costs of leaving, provided the individual recognize that these costs have been incurred (Mowday et al., 1979).Continuance commitment is expressed as a need to stay in the organization founded on the costs related with leaving.These costs are evident in two different ways: (a) as individuals increase tenure in an organization they accrue investments in the form of retirement fund, seniority, dedication and un-transferable job abilities, local membership, domestic ties and so on which may be sacrificed or spoiled by changing jobs; and (b) individuals may experience as though they have to stay in their present jobs because they do not have any substitute job opportunities.Therefore, Meyer and Allen (1991) suggest that because of side bets and a lack of job substitute somewhere else, employees with a strong CC stay with the organization since they feel as though they have to do so.

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Normative commitment (NC)
Normative commitment refers to an employee's wish to continue with the organization on a sense of responsibility, devotion or ethical obligation.This kind of commitment may develop from an individual's society or job ethic, causing them to feel obligated to continue with the organization.NC is distinguishable from affective and continuance commitment in that it does not reflect a need to relate with the organization's objectives or missions and vision and that there is also no explicit extrinsic exchange involved in the association.Therefore, the sense of faithfulness and responsibility underlying an employee's NC influences the individual to stay with the organization because they feel as though they must to do so (Meyer & Allen, 1997).Furthermore it may reproduce an internalized standard, developed earlier than the employee who links the organization in the course of family or other socialization courses, that one should be loyal to one's organization.Normative Commitment is the result of employee's obligatory sense to be a part of the organization (Nawab & Bhatti, 2011; Irfan et al., 2013).

INTENTION TO LEAVE (ITL)
From the literature, switchovers are seen as a psychological decision (conative) intervening stuck between an individual's feelings (affect) about a job and his/her succeeding behavior to either continue or leave.ITL of workforces can be aggressively controlled through the handling of the contextual variables of organizational commitment and job satisfaction (Martin & Roodt, 1999).There is a mechanism that can change the employee's intention such as organizational commitment, environment and so on (Gul et al., 2012).The perception of OC in recent times develop in organization and attracts important response in studying the workplace behaviors and approaches, as it is linked with the important organizational problem; the employee's ITL, the organization followed by actual conclusion to leave the organization.It is obvious that switchover of professional and knowledgeable employees can diminish the performance of knowledge based institutions (Darougheha et al., 2013;Irfan et al., 2013).
Switchover studies make a distinction between actual switchover and ITL the organization, with much of the research focusing on intent to leave.Actual switchover is more complicated to study since once the organizational members have gone, they are not easy to trace and their response rate to surveys is often low.Though, significant work has been done, to establish the relationship between 3-D commitment and switchover, as well as the mediating effects of affective commitment on ITL, a little gap in the research remains.Previous studies modeling the association between OC and ITL have mostly paying attention on Affective commitment as the mediating variable (Clugston, 2000).The need remains to diminish the complexity of such constructs as the quality of faculty work life, to make clear how perceptions of work life have an effect on such outcomes as self-esteem or satisfaction and sequentially to find out what contributes the faculty ITL (Linda & Johnsrud, 2002).
Switchover behavior is a multistage course of action that includes attitudinal, decisional and behavioral components (Nawab & Bhatti, 2011).Research on academician's intent to leave reflects the anxiety to include individual, structural and contextual uniqueness.The aim of this study is, to precede our understanding to inspect the associations among the three constructs of OC and to determine the extent to which these relationships operate within faculty groups  (Linda & Johnsrud, 2002).This study also aims to look at the impact of OC on the intentions to leave.It seems that the study focuses on academicians, since academics' intention to leave is an important issue for the successful achievement of the educational purposes (Altunoglu & Sarpkaya, 2012).To reduce employee's ITL is the most important organizational challenge for HRD in almost each institution, for this principle, HRD engages employees in fair motivational tricks.

ORGANIZATIONAL COMITMENT & INTENTION TO LEAVE
The educational sector plays a vital role for the development of any country.Academicians have a critical responsibility in this sector and the society they survive in.Their commitment will affect the excellence of services they provide.Because of high-tech alteration, in all sectors including the education, competent employees are required.Psychosomatic issues like intention to leave and organizational commitment can influence an academic performance.As a result, teaching can be identified as a stressful line of work.The indication of ITL, both the organizational and the individual level, are relatively significant in an educational background.Teacher switchover and intention to leave are vital issues for the administrators and educators in higher educational institutions, because of the implications for future hiring practices and apprehension for the preservation of skilled and competent workforce.
One of the universal problems in knowledge based organizations in propensity of skilled workforce to leave that have significantly and negatively influence the organizational performance.The argument sophisticated in the study is that academician's awareness of their work lives consequence in attitudinal outcomes and in turn, whether morale has an effect on the intent of faculty members to leave their institutions (Linda & Johnsrud, 2002).To prevent this dilemma, different researchers have created different thoughts such as, organization commitment, job satisfaction and human resource practices.By applying suitable HR practices, universities may enhance the Job satisfaction and organizational commitment and thereby they may affect their intention to leave (Ashar et al., 2013;Irfan et al., 2013).
The commitment and its dimensional construct consist of elements of desire, need and obligatory sense which are characterized in the affective, continuance and normative commitments.Affective commitment is the level to which an individual's aims and standards align with the organizations is hypothesized to directly influence the individual's wish to stay in the organization (Meyer & Allen, 1997).High employee switchover rate has gradually been an issue of interest to both practitioners and academicians, not just in developed countries but also in the developing countries.From the viewpoint of HRM, high switchover is a grave issue due to a number of reasons.First, high turnover rate has monetary consequences, because once the employees leave, the recruiting, selecting and training of new employees becomes necessary.Second, employee switchover may disturb institution's output and thus performance, particularly when it involves important positions in the organizations.High switchover also promotes a sense of discontinuity in the place of work.Due to these harmful consequences, it is then vital for the institutions to better identify with the factors causal to employee switchover from the institution (Darougheha et al., 2013).

International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences
February 2014, Vol.ITL is an aspect of employees` negative feelings in the direction of their work.Employees who experience higher levels of job displeasure and suffer exhaustion are at a greater risk to leave their institution.Actual switchover is more complicated to study because once the organizational membership have gone, they are not easy to trace and their response rate to surveys is frequently low.In previous studies, however, intent to continue or leave one's place has been found to be a good alternative indicator for actual switchover (Ali et al., 2012).Researcher enlightened three most important reasons of the switchover in educational sector are organizational commitment, job satisfaction and availability of novel job opportunities (Ashar et al., 2013).Losing their highly competent and skilled employees is the alarming state for the higher educational institutions.Consequently switchover may be costly to the organizations while commitment is generally used as attractive skills that might enhance in the employees (Jehanzeb et al., 2013;Irfan et al., 2013).

DEMOGRAPHIC EFFECTS ON OC & ITL
Recognizing the complications and the comprehensive nature of antecedents involved in the organizational behaviors, it is still required to realize the dynamics of associations between employees' demographic individuality, their organizational commitment and intention to leave.Personal characteristics that are commonly investigated are the age, gender, academic qualifications, designation, experience, domicile, department and marital status.Employees leaving and staying be different most sharply according to their perceptions of quality of living, time stress and relations with the colleagues (Linda & Johnsrud, 2002).Age and experience are the important predictors of organizational commitment may be for the reason that, longer the faculties stay with an institution or the older they are the more time they have to appraise their association with the organization.It is also expected that workers with advanced academic qualifications take up superior ranks and therefore have additional responsibilities which habitually need more commitment to the organization.A justification for this study might be that married employees rather than single employees have extra family responsibilities to cater for that have need of financial support and as such they are more committed to the organization (Salami, 2008).
Organizational commitment had an important association with the age of the respondent where results pointed out a tendency rising in which commitment to the organization increases as age increases.One more important association was also observed between OC and the highest academic qualification of the respondent, where it was found that OC reduced as the level of education increased.An advanced academic qualification resultant in additional job opportunities could be the good reason behind this result.Commitment may not be an emotional predisposition, but to a certain extent in this case the self-assurance one has about finding substitute (Nawab S and Bhatti, 2011).The faculty members who leave the university both, women and men, professed diverse obstacle to their achievement than those who continued (Linda & Johnsrud, 2002).Research finding dealing with the association with age are apparently reliable.Results frequently indicates that the younger the age at application to the organization, the higher the switchover relationship (Bakan et al., 2011;Irfan et al., 2013).To the degree that the demographic factors are concerned, age, gender, marital status, academic qualifications and work experiences have been found to be considerably related to OC.The results from the study indicated that the personal attributes like age, gender, marital status, experience and academic qualifications significantly predicted the OC of the faculties which on the other hand have an impact on ITL.Older individuals put more investment within an organization; therefore they have intention to stay longer.In addition, ITL had an important association with the experience of the individual as the results showed that an inverted U-trend is encountered where turnover increased primarily as experience increased and then decreased once hit the highest point is reached (Salami, 2008).Intentions to leave had an important association with the age of the respondent, as the results showed that as age increased, intentions to stay are enhanced.An older respondent does not essentially associate to a more qualified one, hence the fact that this association holds significance (Ali et al., 2012;Irfan et al., 2013).

DISCUSSIONS
Gaining and retaining competitive lead is significant to the organizations.Organizations implement various policies to achieve advantage over their challengers, but capitalizing individual resources is still not usually acknowledged.There is an increasing tendency of human resource practices but only few organizations take advantage of individual resource deliberately (Jehanzeb et al., 2013).Organizations spending a lot on the employee's development to be expected certain benefits.Organizations invested in employee development will have to produce more contented and committed employees.The association between professed expenditure on employee development and intention to leave is completely mediated by job satisfaction and affective commitment but continuous commitment is not mediated the association (Ashar et al., 2013).
Particularly, both emotional exhaustion and depersonalization are related with the suspicious coping mechanism of burnout that will direct to switchover or the wish to leave, while personal achievement is more associated to results reflecting optimistic self-efficacy, such as control coping approach.Though, empirical research on the associations among the three burnout components with switchover or the wish to leave as an outcome of teacher burnout is inadequate and contradictory (Altunoglu & Sarpkaya, 2012).Low satisfaction level of teachers can also create some issues such as absenteeism, switchover or intention to leave.It follows that the study of teacher switchover is of great significance to the efficiency of teachers and subsequent student learning.It is believed that these factors and their impacts have to be examined.A strong inverse association is also confirmed by the research between organizational commitment and intentions to leave of an employee.Therefore, organizations should think about how to get their employees strongly familiar with their organizational goals, missions, vision and standards (Jehanzeb et al., 2013;Irfan et al., 2013).
Based on the literature on employee ITL, employees may prefer intra-organizational mobility (i.e.changing job for a new in the same organization) or changing professions (a more drastic decision).First, in order to continue their professional and/or personal advantages, employees may look for job opportunities within their organization.Second, individuals who perceive psychosomatic bond breach or violation experience that their prospects have not been met (Paille & Dufour, 2013).Intention to leave may be defined as employee's decision to leave the current job.Employee may leave the organization, firstly voluntarily means due to unfavorable work environment or they have other job opportunities.Secondly involuntarily switchover means employer fire the employees due to incompetency.Involuntarily switchover is from employer's side.The cost of employee switchover is not easy to measure particularly when the workers performance is high and possesses high level of talent and skills (Ashar et al., 2013).
As we discussed previously, affective organizational commitment refers to the employee's emotional attachment, as well as recognition with and contribution in the organization, it is expected that committed employees may consequently stay because they desire to continue their relationship in order to make possible organizational objectives (Salleh et al., 2012).Although, a resent research conducted by researchers showed no significant association between OC and intention to leave; most researchers have found a significantly negative relationship between OC and ITL.They hypothesize a variety of antecedents involving how the organization is experienced (e.g., salary, size, integration, communication, centralization, opportunity) that have an effect on intermediate social psychosomatic variables such as job satisfaction, self-esteem, and commitment.In turn, these variables are proposed to affect intended and actual organizational switchover (Linda & Johnsrud, 2002).

FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION
The outcome of the examination indicates that low commitment is the most important factor in academician's ITL to switch their positions and their institutions.As a result, the commitment to the organization will be lowered as less 'dependence' is to be found on the organization (Nawab & Bhatti, 2011).A better understanding of factors that are related with organizational commitment can be supportive in scheming strategies and interventions to enhance the academician's commitment and to reduce the intention to leave.There is miniature understanding on the association between individual-centered requirements measurement approach in ITL and determining of OC (Anvari & Amin, 2011).Employee's participative activities and its impact on employee's intension to leave is the potential guidelines for scholars to determine inter communication level of employees and institution and its further impact on employee's switchover (Altunoglu & Sarpkaya, 2012).