Individual factors affecting organisational learning disabilities and affective organizational commitment and their impact on change oriented organizational citizenship behaviour in Indian railways : Perceptipns of officers

Abstract

For the last quarter of the 20th century, government sectors in various countries have been witnessing influx of new ideas and initiatives for bringing change in the working of government organizations. Such reforms in government sector forced these organizations to learn from past incidences and to evaluate existing organizational problems. Thus information about learning capability and learning disabilities of various units of the government sector becomes important area of research. Findings of such research may enhance capability of policy makers and public administrators to take appropriate decision to overcome obstacles at the stage of policy formulation and its implementation. In this study the author has studied a large government unit-Indian Railways (IR). IR is the largest civil organization in India which caters to the need of passenger and goods transportation of the country. The study intends to find level of Change-oriented Organisational Citizenship Behaviour among IR s officers and to find out important factors affecting such behaviours. Antecedent to Organizational Learning Disability and Affective Organizational Commitment were Leader-member Exchange, Organizational Politics, Personal Empowerment; and consequence of all these factors was Change-oriented Organisational Citizenship Behaviour. To study such antecedent and consequential factors responses, from 185IR officers, to standard questionnaires, were collected. These responses were analysed with the application of SPSS and AMOS to find out links among the studied factors. In this study, new variables of Organisational Learning Disability were also discovered which might be useful for further study of Organisational Learning Disability in the Indian context. Organizational Politics was found to be the most prominent factor that is linked to Organisational Learning Disability. Moreover, Organizational Politics, Leader-Member Exchange and Organisational Learning Disabilities were found to have significant impact on Change-oriented Organisational Citizenship Behaviour. Furthermore, the study also reveals that perception of Knowledge Diffusion Deficiency, the bottleneck to dissemination of ideas and information, puts negative impact on Affective Organisational Commitment among IR officers. To overcome learning disabilities, Indian Railways should try to reduce perception of organisational politics, and excessive coordination among its subunits and enhance information dissemination in IR.