The Role of Gender in Building Organisational Commitment in India’s Services Sourcing Industry

While India’s services sourcing industry is on a high momentum path, its projects also face unprecedented employee related challenges regarding attrition of existing employees and identification of new talent. Organisational commitment is therefore a critical concern that affects success of the sourcing project, the firm, and the industry. Female employees are often considered to be a key talent pool in India, which will enable the industry to grow further. But women are often hypothesised to experience life differently, leading to differences in cognition, affect, and behaviour. This differential empirical analysis uses data collected from IT employees in India (N = 330; 26 per cent female). We aim to understand what organisational aspects of the work environment motivate female and male Indian IT employees, and what drives their commitment to the employing organisation. Using gender as a dichotomous moderator, we analyse the relationships between organisational climate, employee climate, and organisational commitment using correlation coefficients and structural equation modelling (SEM) with subgroup comparison. The items describing organisational and employee climate are derived from the organisational practices scales of the GLOBE study; the items for organisational commitment follow Allen and Meyer’s three-component model of affective, normative, and continuance commitment. The results show that female employees appear to have a higher level of organisational commitment than their male counterparts; however, they are not motivated by the same antecedents in the same way. While organisational climate and employee climate are moderately correlated with each other for both genders, the employee climate seems to have no influence on the commitment of female employees. In order to successfully motivate Indian employees, we suggest it necessary to define organisational climate change measures separately, and specifically targetted at female and male employees.