This paper focuses on one’s “willingness to remain within the organization” as organizational commitment, and analyzes whether a person who experienced job change has less willingness to remain within the organization. This paper also pays attention to “job search paths” as a matching function between jobs and human resources, and analyzes the effects of job search paths on one’s willingness to remain within the organization.
As a result, when “years of service” is controlled, it turned out that people with job change experience do not have lower willingness to remain within the organization, comparing to people without job change experience. It is often considered that people who experienced job change have lower willingness to remain within the organization. It is because people with job change experience have fewer years of service, and have received less investment from the organization, such as education, compared to the people of same age without job change experience. Therefore, it is a problem to compare people of same age with and without job change experience, without considering years of service.
This research brings a new perspective regarding job search paths: when controlling the factors that influence “willingness to remain within the organization”, it turned out that a job change through personal contacts does not have an effect of enhancing “willingness to remain within that organization”. This result shows a different viewpoint from the preceding studies which argue that the information obtained from personal contacts is high in quality and improves one’s satisfaction of the new job and organization after a job change.