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Proceedings of the 9 Symposium on Applied Science, Business & Industrial Research – 2017
ISSN 2279-158, ISBN 978-955-7442-09-9

A Study on Organizational Commitment of Non-managerial Employees
and Wastage at the Ceylon Electricity Board

Dharamasooriya WRD, Ekanayake EMP, Appuhamy PADAN
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka
rashinidulanjalee@gmail.com
ABSTRACT

The Ceylon Electricity Board is the largest electricity company in Sri Lanka. This
research is a study on organizational commitment of non-managerial employees and
wastage in Ceylon Electricity Board. The Organizational commitment is a feeling of
dedication towards one's employing organization, willingness to work hard for that
employer, and the intent to remain with that organization. There are three types of
organizational commitment namely affective commitment, continuous commitment, and
normative commitment. In the present study, the level of the organizational commitment
was checked for the non-managerial employees at the Ceylon Electricity Board. To observe
the level of commitment, the primary data were collected using questionnaires distributed
among 50 non-managerial level employees. Wastage of electricity occurs in the process of
supplying electricity to consumers due to technical and commercial losses. Therefore,
monthly electricity wastage data from January 2007 to April 2016 were used to forecast
future wastage at Ceylon Electricity Board. Box-Jenkins technique was utilized to identify
an appropriate Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average model (SARIMA)
model for wastage data. The best model among two tentative models was selected by
comparing Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) values of the model. The study revealed
that, affective commitment of the employees was at high level. However, continuance and
normative were somewhat poor. Therefore, employee loyalty, dedication toward to duties
and values are at low level. Moreover SARIMA (2, 1, 0) (0, 1, 0)12 was identified as best
model to predict future electricity wastage due to technical and commercial losses at Galle
Branch.

KEYWORDS: Electricity wastage, Organizational commitment, Time series

1 INTRODUCTION complex and depend on the context and
variables under consideration (Mathieu &
Organizational commitment plays a Zajac, 1990).
vital role in determining whether an
employee will stay with the organization For example, organizational
and work towards organizational goal. commitment acts as a central explanatory
Managers usually face a difficulty in variable for understanding individual work
developing committed employees especially behaviors such as job performance and goal
in the case of expatriates. Therefore, it is attainment (Meyer, Becker &
immensely important for the management to Vandenberghe, 2004). The necessity of
be considerate of various factors that study on organizational commitment
implicate and sustain organizational provide by non-managerial employee has
commitment of employees. The been identified by CEB to enhance their
commitment that an employee exhibits commitment towards organization by
towards an organization has consistently understanding prevailing issues among
been found to be related to workplace them. This research was addressed the
behavior. The nature and direction of following three types of organizational
relationships within the workplace is commitment namely;

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