Abstract:
Corporate Culture combines many aspects of an organization from top to bottom of its
hierarchy. In addition to the tangible practices and processes followed in an organization,
personal factors of an individual also amend their thoughts towards employer. Hence,
Corporate Culture is an important factor in strengthening an employer-employee
relationship, which in tum has a direct influence in reducing the turnover intention and
Organizational Commitment. Software companies are based on knowledge workers of the
organizations rather than physical assets that create competitive advantage within the
industry. Thus, loss of frequent key assets can severely harm the sustainability of an
organization in long run. This empirical study attempts to reveal the relationship if any,
between the software professional’s perception towards Cultural factors at work place and
measure their levels of Organizational Commitment.
The selected population of this study is the software professionals working in software
industiy in Sri Lanka which estimated as 21,914 (SLICTA, 2010) by 2010. Therefore, the
calculated random sample size required 378 responses from software professionals in IT
industiy.
In the present study cultural factors were tested including; Communication Patterns, Training
& Development, Leadership, Teamwork, Management Practices and Reward System. The
results revealed that all the cultural variables have a linear relationship with Affective and
Normative Commitment levels of employees. Furthermore, Teamwork, Management
Practices and Reward Systems show a considerable negative linear relationship with
Continuous Commitment, which reveals possible areas for further research. The study
exposes that Organization Tenure and Gender moderates the relationship of Corporate
Culture and Organizational Commitment as tenure increases. The results divulged the fact
that influencing ability of Corporate Cultural variables on Affective Commitment reduce as
Tenure increases, except for Leadership and Teamwork. Meanwhile, influencing capability
increases for Normative Commitment, as Tenure increases on Commitment levels. Another
significant finding was that the male software professionals give more weight for Leadership
in gaining Organizational Commitment, while Female software professionals give weight to
both Leadership and Reward System to gain Organizational Commitment. However there
was no substantial evidence from the study that either genders being more committed to the
employed organization one over the other. Age and Designation of software professionals
did not disclose any impact in their level ofOrganizational Commitment.
This research brings out valuable research outcomes that can be incorporated in software
organization’s employee retention strategies, in order to gain stability and ultimately enhance
the company bottom-line. Through the aspects of focussing on Teamwork and Leadership
factors to reach higher Affective Commitment levels as tenure increases would create value
in a workforce. Furthermore, the present study specifies other avenues that could be explored
as future research areas, based on the variables such as the job role that would play the
mediating role in measuring commitment levels.
