The relationship between workplace stress and employee engagement in the fast-food industry: The role of organizational commitment as the mediator

Organizational Commitment and Employee Engagement are among the important issues that need to be addressed by organizations and researchers to understand the impacts affecting them. Currently, organizational commitment and employee engagement are the challenges to be overcome by most of the organizations. Thus, to gain better understanding on these issues, this particular study identified the factors influencing organizational commitment and employee engagement. The main purposes of this study were to examine the effects of workplace stress towards organizational commitment and employee engagement and also to investigate organizational commitment as the mediator, affecting the levels of employee engagement among staffs of the fast food restaurants in Pulau Pinang. In the data collection process, 155 sets of questionnaires were distributed to all staff of fast-food restaurants in Pulau Pinang and 150 questionnaires were returned with the response rate of 96.8%. All the data were analyzed by using IBM SPSS version 20. The results, obtained through Pearson Correlation analysis, Linear Correlation analysis and Multiple Regression analysis indicated that workplace stress had a relationship with organizational commitment and employee engagement. These findings provided useful information for the fast food restaurant management regarding all the aspects of employees especially in managing their stress in the workplace that affecting their performance in the organization.