The importance of organizational context on employees' attitudes: an examination of working in main offices versus branch offices.

Organizational context is important in the determination of attitudes and behaviors (Rousseau, 1978). This paper presents the results of a study conducted with employees of branch banks and main o/rice banks' regarding their job-related attitudes. It is' hypothesized in this paper that employees in the branch banks will have lower levels" of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, and partial inclusion and higher levels' of role conflict and role ambiguity. The findings are consistent with the findings of Podsakoff, Niehoff, MacKenzie and Williams (1993) who suggested that researchers would be well advised to consider organizational context in future research.

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More than twenty years ago, Rousseau (1978, p. 522) noted "recognition is growing that both individual differences and characteristics of organizational settings are germane to all phases of organizational research." Organizational context is important in the determination of attitudes and behaviors (Rousseau, 1978). Based on their findings, Podsakoff, Niehoff, MacKenzie and Williams (1993) suggested that organizational context should be considered in future organizational commitment research. Rousseau defined context as "the set of circumstances or facts surrounding an event ... context can refer to characteristics of the organizational setting, of the individual, of his or her role in the organization, and of any other environmental factor that may shape responses" (Rousseau, 1978, p. 522). Researchers have used many different contextual variables including tasks characteristics such as task identity, task significance, autonomy, dealing with others, variety, feedback, and learning (Rousseau, 1978), structure and technology (Sutton and Rousseau, 1979), organizational age, slack resources, and size (Nystrom, Ramamurthy, & Wilson, 2002), structure, size, and motivating potential of jobs (Ashforth, Saks, & Lee, 1998), and size, geographic scope, and product scope (Gopalakrishnan and Damanpour, 2000). One contextual issue that has not received much research attention is the effect of physical distance from the main office on the job-related attitudes of employees.

The importance of the issue of physical distance from the main office is growing as the trend toward telecommuting and mergers and acquisitions grows which increases the number of people working away from the main office. Potter (2003, p. 73) suggests that "telecommuting changes the context of the workplace ... because "face time" between employer and employee is reduced." Additionally, Potter reports that managers believe that telecommuting negatively impacts the relationship managers have with employees. Managers are not as likely to promote telecommuters as those employees that remain in the office (Potter, 2003). The issue with physical distance may be that employees may translate physical distance to psychological distance. In other words, employees in outlying offices or working at home may not feel as much as part of the team as those in the main office. Communication and interaction, both formal and informal, may be lacking for those employees in outlying offices. On the other hand, with advances in technology such as e-mail, physical distance from the main office may not have an impact on the attitudes of employees. Without empirical investigation, the effect of physical distance is unknown.

In this study, physical distance is determined by whether the employees work in the main office or in an outlying branch office. Although there are differences between telecommuting and working in a branch office because in branch offices employees still have interaction and contact with first-line supervisors, both entail not having "face time" with higher level managers. The actual distance measured in miles was not used in this study. The purpose of this study is to examine differences, if any, in the job-related attitudes between employees that work in branch offices and those employees that work in main offices. The job-related attitudes that are examined are job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, partial inclusion, role conflict, and role ambiguity.

Job satisfaction is defined as "the degree to which employees have a positive affective orientation toward employment by the organization" (Price & Mueller, 1986; p. 215). Organizational commitment is defined as "the relative strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization" (Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979; p. 226). Job involvement is defined as "the degree to which a person is identified psychologically with his work, or the importance of work in his total self-image" (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965; p. 24). Partial inclusion is defined as "the extent to which individuals perceive themselves to be a part of the day-to-day activities of the organization" (Clinebell, 1988; p. 5). Role conflict occurs when expectations of multiple roles are incompatible (Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964). Role ambiguity occurs when there is uncertainty about the expectations of a certain role (Kahn et al., 1964). This study will examine these variables in the context of main and branch banks to determine if location impacts these job-related variables.

Literature Review

Organizational context has been identified as important for research examining individual responses concerning job-related attitudes to take into consideration (Rousseau, 1978; Sutton & Rousseau, 1979). Sutton and Rousseau (1979, p. 675) stated "behavior in organizations is largely a function of the settings in which it occurs." Podsakoff et al. (1993) found that twice as many organizational characteristics influenced commitment than the other variables in their study. This finding led Podsakoff et al. to suggest that organizational context should be considered in future research related to organizational commitment. Organizational context has also been used as a variable in studies examining organizational justice (Ambrose & Schminke, 2003), trust (Becerra & Gupta, 2003), team effectiveness (Doolen, Hacker, & Aken, 2003), gender and leadership (Becket, Ayman, & Korabik, 2002; van Engen, van der Leeden, & Willemsen, 2001), innovativeness (Gopalakrishnan & Damanpour, 2000; Nystrom, Ramamurthy K., & Wilson, 2002), socialization (1998), intent to quit (Jinnett & Alexander, 1999), gender stereotyping (Gatton, DuBois, & Faley, 1999), environmental strategy (Sharma, 2000), and sexual harassment (Mueller, DeCoster, & Estes, 2001),

However, the organizational context variable of the effects of physical distance has not been widely examined, resulting in a lack of literature related to the management effects of physical distance. Only a few studies have even mentioned the issue of physical distance. Kerr and Jermier (1978) noted that spatial distance between superior and subordinates was a neutralizer of leadership, which they defined as creating "circumstances in which effective leadership may be impossible" (p. 396). in a test of Kerr and Jermier's assertion that the degree of spatial distance between supervisors and subordinates is a neutralizer of leadership, Podsakoff et al. (1993) found that employees who are spatially distant from their leaders have lower levels of organizational commitment. They also found that spatial distance was negatively correlated with job satisfaction and performance and positively correlated to role conflict.

A study by Kirkham, Richbell, and Watts (1998) examined the impact of physical distance on the decision to close plants in multi-plant manufacturing firms. They found that one of the factors in the plant closing decisions was the remoteness to the head office. In other words, those plants closer to the main office were more likely to survive unless other important factors such as age and size were vastly inferior. It was noted that the factor of distance may arise because management in the main office may have more limited knowledge of more distant plants because they are visited less frequently and main office management may have fewer informal links with the local managers of more distant plants.

Although there has been little research in this area, the results of the studies that have been conducted indicate that physical distance between employees and the leadership system might yield lower organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and performance; higher levels of role conflict; fewer informal links; and more limited knowledge on the part of the higher level managers. The purpose of this study is to examine if there are differences in job-related attitudes between employees that work in branch offices and employees that work in main offices.

Development of Hypotheses