Effect of organizational culture on employee commitment in the Indian IT services sourcing industry

Purpose – As clients of India’s IT services providers continue to complain about knowledge loss caused by high attrition rates in their offshore delivery factories, the linkages between organizational culture and commitment of the Indian employee base are of interest to researchers as well as practitioners. This paper seeks to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Data was collected in the first half of 2012 through the ICCAe appraisal framework from 291 Indian IT executives and managers working for two IT services sourcing provider organizations in Pune and Bangalore, India. To analyse the data, descriptive and inferential statistics were used together with multiple regression and confirmatory factor analysis. Findings – Taken together, this researchmakes several contributions. First, the results of data analysis exhibit that, among the organizational culture dimensions, in-group collectivism and performance orientation are the antecedentswith the biggest effect on employee commitment. Other culture dimensions show varying degree of positive and negative influence on employee commitment. Second, this paper contributes to the cross-cultural generalizability discussion of employee commitment. The data analysis unveils a stronger correlation between affective and normative commitment in the Indian context as compared to other North American studies. Third, it supports suggestions put forward in other research that continuance commitment should be split into the two subfactors c/alternative and c/sacrifice. Practical implications – It is proposed that the Indian IT services sourcing industry should be adept at thinking about employee commitment from an organizational culture point of view. Originality/value – The proposed model of this research posits and proves that employee commitment in an Indian IT services offshoring context is influenced by organizational culture.