Employee Loyalty. In a continuously developing economy, organizations sometimes forget basic resources within their own organization, namely their employees. Attention spent on your workforce has a positive effect on their performance and loyalty. A loyal employee most of the time is proud to work for his employer/organization, this conviction will be visible to one of the most important aspects of the enterprise, being the customer. The loyalty of your workforce can be seen as their devotion to the company. Indicators of employee loyalty are for example the responsibility your staff is willing to take for their work or the willingness to look for another job (Anskaitis and Xxxxxxxx, 2005). Again, employee loyalty is a part of this research. In section 3 I will elaborate on different indicators of loyalty and their impact on the performance of a research institute. The difference between loyalty and commitment is not sufficiently emphasized. “Though loyalty and commitment have much in common, much is lost when the two concepts are treated synonymously. Whereas commitment is more likely to have a strong connection to employee turnover, loyalty might be more strongly related to the likelihood of whistle-blowing or organizational citizenship behaviors” (Xxxxxxxx,2005). Xxxxxxxx (2005) also explains that (just as with intellectual capital) different definitions of employee loyalty were used over time, resulting in different measures. This makes it of course more difficult to compare the level of employee loyalty of you own firm with the level of other institutions. Xxxxxxxx (2005) investigated these different definitions and then set up a new conceptualization of loyalty as follows: “Loyalty is reflected in behavior that can be tied to an implicit promise, voluntarily made by an individual operating in a community of interdependent others, to ad here to universalizable moral principles in pursuit of individual and collective goals.” There are three major aspects that are included in this definition. First of all loyalty involves a pact between interdependent individuals, so there has to be a relationship between two parties with the intention to satisfy individual and collective needs. Secondly, the definition indicates that loyalty involves the behavior based upon a community’s shared values. So loyalty occurs when the actions of the parties reflect the shared moral values of the organization. The third and last aspect of the definition involves that loyal individuals act acco...
