• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.139-159
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• 1996

This study comparatively examines a causal model of employee attatchment which focuses on employee's organizational commitment and intent to stay with an organization. This study is based on two separate studies of employee attachment among teachers : the U.S. case of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the South Korean case of the Seoul Educational District (SED). The main purpose of this study is to replicate in Korea the CPS study. A revised model based on the unique characteristics of Korean teachers is also developed and estimated. The Price Mueller model of employee attachment provides the basic theoretical framework for this study. It includes five general classes of variables : 1) employee responses to work variables : job satisfaction, commitment, and intent to stay; 2) psychological stress variables: role ambiguity, role conflict, work overload, and quality of students; 3) social structural variables: autonomy, routinization, distributive justice, and legitimacy; 4) economic structural variables: pay, job security, promotional opportunities, and job opportunities; and 5) work orientation variables : career commitment, normative commitment, work motivation, affectivity, work values, and met expectations. The data was collected through questionnaire survey and a sample of 649 secondary school teachers in Seoul, South Korea, was included in the final analysis. Covariance structure analysis (LISREL) was used to estimate the causal model. The results indicate that the endogenous variables of job satisfaction and commitment play a considerably less important role than in the U.S. model in mediating the effects of the exogenous variables on intent to stay, and the model fails to explain the majority of the variance in intent to stay. In addition, the new variables added to the revised Korean model do not bave significant effects on intent to stay. The structural characteristics of the employment relationship and labor markets associated with Korean teachers forced mobility and closed external markets - are largely accountable for the major differences between the Korean and the U.S. cases. The study suggests that conceptual and empirical work on what produces employee attachment under these structural constraints needs to receive more attention in future studies.