Human Resource Development Climate in Ethiopia: Empirical Analysis on Selected Private and Public Organizations

Abstract

Employees are the priceless assets of any organization. Given the opportunities and by providing the right type of climate in an organization, individuals can be helped to give full contribution to their potentials and achieve the goals of the organization. For this purpose an amiable HRD climate is extremely important. For the purpose of the study, primary data were collected from 331employees working in 12 different organizations through a structured questionnaire. The present study is an attempt to contribute to a better understanding of the HRD climate prevailing in selected public universities, private higher education institutions and MIDROC TG in Ethiopia and to make a comparative analysis to understand whether these organizations have conducive HRD climate or not. Additionally the level job satisfaction and organizational commitment as well as impacts of human resource development climate on the job satisfaction and organizational commitment were assessed; items contributing towards better job satisfaction and organizational commitment identified including those items that need management intervention for improvement. Job satisfaction and organizational commitment predicting equations are also developed as a function of HRDC. The findings of this study revealed that the overall HRDC prevalence in private HEIs was the highest while the HRDC prevalence in public universities is the lowest. Results showed that there exists a significant variation among the three types of institutions in HRD climate with no statistically significant difference in HRDC between MIDROC TG and Private HEIs. Noticeable difference is renowned, however, between private and public universities. The overall job satisfaction confirmed that there is better job satisfaction in private HEIs, followed by MIDROC TG and relatively least job satisfaction for public universities and the differences are significant. The findings showed that job satisfaction level of employees in the organizations studied is good. Furthermore Job satisfaction predicting equation is also constructed as a function of HRDC for the three types of organizations and for the overall all data. The equations are found to be significant. One of the objectives of this study was the assessment of the organizational commitment of employees and the impact of the HRDC on this variable. From the three components of the organizational commitment, affective commitment for private HEIs is highly rated. The difference in affective commitment among the three institution types is statistically significant. The Mann-Whitney test shows the non-existence of significant difference between the private and public universities in affective domain of organizational commitment. Concerning the normative component of OC, the private HEIs are relatively better than the others and the difference is found to be statistically significant. It was also found out that the difference between the private and public universities is statistically significant. Results on the overall organizational commitment showed that private HEIs are better than the other two. The non-parametric independent test between private and public universities showed private HEIs are better than the others. Institution wise, Ethiopian Civil Service University showed relatively better affective, normative and continuance commitment in descending order and stands first in the overall employees’ commitment. The overall organizational commitment for the sampled institutions is average. The impact of HRDC on the OC was assessed and a predicting equation as function of HRDC developed for the three types of organizations and for the overall data. The equations are found to be significant. Conclusions and recommendations are also made.