The role of employee relationship proneness in creating employee loyalty

Purpose – The paper aims to investigate the impact of employee relationship proneness (RP) on the three different types of attitudinal loyalty (affective, calculative, and normative commitment (NC)) and relate these different types of attitudinal loyalty to employee loyalty behaviours in terms of word‐of‐mouth, intention to stay (ITS), benefit insensitivity (BI), and complaining (COM). Design/methodology/approach – An empirical research among 199 employees of a bank was conducted to test the hypothesized model. Findings – Structural equation modelling results reveal that employee RP is a strong antecedent of affective and NC. Affective commitment plays a pivotal role in creating all positive loyalty behaviours of employees, whereas NC only supports ITS and BI while it has a negative impact on COM. Calculative commitment has a negative impact on BI and COM. Research limitations/implications – As a result of the single industry, cross sectional design the external validity of the findings is somewhat limited. Practical implications – The main practical implication of the study is that banks should incorporate RP when assessing potential employees. These relationship prone employees are most likely to exhibit affective and NC, which can be considered as the foundation of employees' loyalty behaviours. Originality/value – The value of this paper is that we develop an extended model on the complex phenomenon of employee loyalty which is generally acknowledged as one of the important building blocks of customer loyalty and the organizational performance of a bank.