Locus of control and its impact on job satisfaction and organisational commitment

Abstract

Previous research has indicated that employee attitudes toward their work could possibly have an influence on their behaviour in the organisation. Job satisfaction and organisational commitment are employee attitudes that have been widely studied by researchers. Satisfied and committed employees have been found to exhibit positive behaviours in the workplace such as low absenteeism and turnover rates, and higher job performance. The current research attempted to determine whether an individual's locus of control was associated with his/her level of job satisfaction and organisational commitment. The hope is that if an association is established, management might be able to shift an individual's locus of control, and so influence employee attitudes towards positive organisational behaviour among employees. A total of 101 respondents served as the sample. The sample consisted of all managerial and non-managerial employees employed at SAB and Johnson & Johnson in East London. Stratified random sampling was used for the present study. The Work Locus of Control Scale (Spector, 1988), the Internal-External locus of control scale (Rotter, 1966) and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (Weiss, Dawis, Englana & Lofquist, 1967) were used to collect data from the respondents.