2021 Volume 72 Issue 1 Pages 12-23
Recently, it has become an issue for companies to improve employee organizational commitment and retain employees. On the other hand, employees tend to develop their career more autonomously and expect to be involved in extra-curricular work activities such as skill development activities and secondary jobs that may contribute to their future career regardless of the main job in their company. In this study, we defined these spontaneous work activities as “extra-curricular activities for career development”, which do NOT aim at contributing to business in the company they belong to but at developing their career proactively. We conducted questionnaire surveys targeting young employees in their 20s and 30s in order to analyze the relationship between motivation for “extra-curricular activities for career development” and organizational commitment to their companies. The results suggested three latent factors behind the motivation: self-improvement study, engagement in external job, and social contribution. The results showed that only the social contribution factor had a weak positive correlation with organizational commitment and the others had no correlation. Moreover, results indicated organizational commitment might be related to employees' perception of a companies' positive attitude to the activities. These findings would be beneficial for companies to establish a policy to deal with employee extra-curricular activities for career development.
