The Influence of Job Characteristics and Perceived Fairness Toward Psychological Empowerment Among Public Sector Employees in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Nowadays organizations face new challengers in high technology and information based competitive environment. Therefore, organizations force to move towards more decentralized structure. To face new challenges, organizations should change their job characteristics from traditional structure to participative management and empowerment. Employee empowerment may be a basic significance within the competitive work environment these days. Since, it can grant the organization a supported competitive advantage. Hence, it is pivotal for organizations to decide the presence of empowerment within the work itself and to which degree the empowerment has been effectively set within the intellect of the worker. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact on psychological empowerment and the two types of predictors namely, job characteristics and perceived fairness of among public sector employees working at district secretariats Northern Province. With a thorough review of the literature, conceptual model was developed. The study developed validated research instruments. The model was empirically tested by collecting data from public sector employees working at district secretariats Northern Province. A total of one hundred and fifty public sector employees were selected for the study using the stratified random sampling technique and one hundred and thirty six usable questionnaires were returned. To validate the items, internal consistency reliability, content validity and convergent validity was tested. Hypotheses were developed and to test hypotheses, Pearson correlation coefficient analysis and regression analysis was used with the support of Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings revealed that job characteristics and psychological empowerment of employees have a strong and significant positive relationship and its forty five percentage impact on psychological empowerment.  Likewise, perceived fairness have a strong significant positive relationship and it is impact forty three percentage on psychological empowerment. Finally, job characteristics and perceived fairness impact forty eight percentage on psychological empowerment. Further, this study provided implications of the results and future direction for further research.

Keywords: Psychological Empowerment, Job Characteristics, Perceived Fairness.

DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-6-07

Publication date: February 29^th 2020