Assessing the Effects of Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction on Turnover: An Event History Approach

Turnover among correctional workers creates persistent staffing problems for correctional administrators. The present research examines the effects of two types of subjective measurement of the work environment, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, which are often thought to be related to turnover. The study examines two separate aspects of organizational commitment, commitment to the overall organization and commitment to the specific institution. It is expected that both aspects of organizational commitment should have a greater effect on turnover than job satisfaction. It is further hypothesized that commitment to the organization, in this case the Bureau of Prisons, should have a greater impact on turnover than institutional commitment. The data for the study come from a subsample (N=3,608) of the 1991 Prison Social Climate Survey administered annually since 1988 to employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The Climate data are supplemented with data from the Bureau’s personnel database. The richness of the combined data sources allows for controlling relevant variables related in prior research to turnover. Discrete-time event history models are used to analyze the data. The analysis confirms that the measures of organizational commitment exert an inverse relationship with turnover. That is, higher levels of organizational commitment are associated with lower levels of turnover. The effects of the measures of organizational commitment are also greater than that of job satisfaction which actually turns out to be nonsignificant. However, both measures of organizational commitment exert about equal influence on turnover with commitment to the Bureau of Prisons only slightly stronger.