The effects of the reciprocity norm and culture on normative commitment for Generation Y

When examining diversity, most researchers look at cultural or gender aspects of diversity. However, generational expectations are yet another type of diversity that is rarely examined, although it should be researched more often. Generation Y employees are only just beginning to enter the workplace, but little is know about them as prospective employees. This study examined how cultural beliefs influenced the temporal aspect of organizational normative commitment. Ordinal and multinomial regression analyses were performed to examine the predictive power of cultural beliefs on the temporal aspect of normative commitment. Descriptive statistics showed that the highest percentage of participants selected "as long as the employee is able to take advantage of the HR practice" as their answer to the length of time an employee should remain with an organization in exchange for certain HR practices. The findings show that this generation views the reciprocity exchange between the organization and the employee as a psychological contract which is formed at the on-start of employment. Once the HR practice is taken away from the employee, the psychological contract is viewed as violated and thus the employee can leave the organization at any point. In terms of cultural beliefs and their influence on the temporal aspect of normative commitment, it was found that social cynicism, reward for application, social flexibility, interpersonal harmony and fate control were predictive of the time an employee should remain with an organization for certain HR practices but not for all of them.