_— yotroduction Different terms have been used to describe the concept of job h as central life interests, work role involvement, ego involvement, suc involved performance, occupational involvement, ego- involvement, motivation, job satisfaction, and finally; job involvement. morale, intrinsic b involvement has been widely studied by industrial Inrecent years jo! morale, psychologists with special reference to employee's job satisfaction, formance. The concept of job involvement has gained he recent years because of its pivotal role providing link hand and employee's need and the quality of participation and pel much importance int between productivity on the one working life on the other. plays a vital role in the modern era of employment Job-involvement ent is t, dissatisfaction and stress. In fact, job involvem of organizational psychology. It is quite necessary to under the human relations in industry because they explain why one man nother, why one group of workers restricts its output and s and the other crisis, disappointment widely studied aspect works harder than a another works energetically, Why one group goes on strike does not. involvement of industrial organization is one of the Enhancing job i employee in an most important problems for researchers. Though; every organization works with similar tools, machines and materials, yet individual differences in their level of job involvement are quite often evident. Organizational psychologists have devoted considerable attention to define the concept of job involvement as a potentially distinct job attitude.os” According to Lodahl & Kejner (1966) “job involvement is the j of values about the goodness of work or the importance of 7 a at of the person, and perhaps it thus measures the ease with vs a can be further socialized by an organization.” mie pam Lodahl (1964) has hypothesized that its main determinant is a ya) < ; . va orientation towards work that is learned early in the socialization proces, . : : . . . s. some ways, according to him, it operationalizes the “Protestant Ethic” a : in because it is result of the interjection of certain values about work into th le self, it is probably resistant to changes in the person due to the nature of a particularjob. Lodahl and Kejner (1965) have also defined “job involvement as the ‘on's work performance affected his self-esteem.” They “the degree to which a person is identified ‘0 his work in his total “self- degree of which a pers considered job involvement as, psychologically with his work or the importance t image.” Hall (1970) defined job involvement as referring to Lawler and “as well as” the degree to which gical identi fication with one's work psycholo; his identity. the job situation is central to person and the involved person is highly © Patchen (1970), hen used a term, namely, is work. Pate! which supposedly measured how According t and feels a sense of pride in hi e's occupation, ‘onal role is to one's self-image. Kanungo, Mish Dayal (1975) opines that the “attitude of job ement represents the degree to which the total job situation is thought involv ® Bag motivated identification with ont important one's occupati ra and— fas being central to one's life or self concept,” a Saleh and Hosek (1976) suggested four different interpretations of fie concept of job en A person is involved (i) when work to him is i entral life interest, (ii) when he actively Participates in his job, (iii) when he perceives performance as a consistent with his self-concept and (iv) when heperceives performance as central to his self-esteem. They also observe job involvement as the degree to which the person identifies with the job, actively participates in it, and considers his performance important to his self-worth. Rabinowitz and Hall (1977), reviewed the researches on job involvement and concluded that: ) (v) (vi) vii) Job involvement is related to three classes of working variables: personal characteristics, situational characteristics and outcomes. No one class of variables shows clearly stronger relationship to job involvement than any other. Job involvement is quite stable. Much of the variable in job involvement remains unexplained. The data are more consistent with the “importance of work” definition of job involvement than with the “extent to which performance affects self-esteem” definition. Job involvement seems to be a “feedback variable” both a cause and effect of job behaviour. Personal and situational variables have independent effects on involvement; and Situational variables seem to have more effect on the attitude of low job involved persons than on highly job involved persons.The various definitions of job involvement have a common Core of meaning in that they describe the job involved person as one for whom; work is a very important part of life, and as one who is affected by much responsibilities of his whole Job situation: the work itself, his co- workers, the company etc. On the other hand, the non-involved worker does his living off-the-job. Work is not an important part of his psychological life, His interests are elsewhere, and the core of his self-image, the essential part of his identity is not greatly affected by the kind of work he does or how well he does it. It is important to note the Guion's (1958) observation that the job involved worker is not necessarily happy with his job; in fact, very angry people may be just as involved in their Jobs as very happy one. There are several research findings on job involvement with respect to other job related variables. Tannenbaum (1965), Mannheim (1975), and Sharma and Kapoor (1970) reported that individuais at higher ranks are more involved with their job. But Lodahl and Kejner (1965) and Rabinowitz (1975) found that there is no relationship among these variables. It has been investigated by Weissenberg and Gruenfeld (1968) that job involvement is significantly related to satisfaction with motivator variables, Schwyhart and Smith (1972) observe a positive relations between job involvement and company satisfaction. According to Vroom's theory (1960) job involvement may be severely influenced by the situational factors. Schwyhart and Smith (1972), Hall and Mansfield (1975), and Sharma and Kapoor (1978) found a positive relation in length of service and job involvement,