Job Autonomy and Work Alienation: Organizational and Occupational Identification as a Mediator

Abstract

This research was conducted to determine the direct and indirect impact of lodging enterprise employees’ perception of job autonomy level on decreasing work alienation tendency. In the examination of the indirect relationships between these two concepts, employees’ perceptions of organizational and occupational identification were determined as mediating variables based on the relevant literature and a structural equation model was developed based on sources of identification and tested via appropriate statistical methods. Questionnaire developed to test the interactions between the variables empirically was applied to lodging enterprise employees in Istanbul which is one of the major tourism destinations in Turkey. Based on the theoretical framework, five research hypotheses which include the direct impact of job autonomy on work alienation and sources of identification were developed. After determining the interactions between the variables, mediating role of organizational and occupational identification in the impact of job autonomy on work alienation was examined through appropriate statistical methods via AMOS 22.0 software package. Structural equation modeling was used to test research hypotheses and mediating effects. After examining model fit indices and path coefficients of variables, it was determined that employees’ perception of job autonomy decreased their tendency for work alienation and organizational identification played a partial mediating role in this decrease. In addition, occupational identification was affected by employees’ perception of job autonomy but did not affect their work alienation levels. Thus, four of the five research hypotheses were confirmed. Findings of this research provide the managers with detailed information on individual and organizational results of providing autonomy for employees at workplace. This study is going to be the first study that aims to analyze the concepts of job autonomy, work alienation, and identification all together with both a theoretical and a structural model. This is also to be the first study on lodging enterprises of tourism industry in this context.

Keywords: Job autonomy, Work alienation, Occupational identification, Organizational identification, Lodging enterprises, Structural equation model