Employee Attachment and Noncoercive Conditions of Work

Recent sociological arguments have claimed that employee attachment in corporatist organizations is produced, not with direct coercive measures, but indirectly by employers controlling various structural conditions of work. It is argued that this also occurs in smaller organizations that do not exhibit internal labor markets nor other corporatist organization characteristics. Specifically, in smaller organizations that are structured more traditionally with the employer deciding work schedules, pay, distribution of profits, and so on, the features of employee social integration, autonomy/participation, and legitimacy of the authority structure are just as important as they are in the larger corporatist firms. This claim is generally supported with data on the job satisfaction, the organizational commitment, the intent to stay, and the turnover of dental hygienists working in dental offices that are controlled by the employer, the dentist. Work group integration and legitimacy-producting features were found to be especially important. In addition, job satisfaction, not organizational commitment (loyalty), was the crucial intervening variable in the causal process. These data indicate that certain basic conditions of work, such as social integration and legitimacy of the authority structure, are essential for employee attachment to form. The actual work structures that produce these conditions, however, can vary considerably.