Workplace attachment and request for professional transfer. Study on a population of French employees

• Author: Rioux, L.
• Position: Department of Psychology, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense, France
• Pages: 91-96

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov

Series VII: Social Sciences • Law • Vol. 4 (53) No. 2 - 2011

WORKPLACE ATTACHEMENT AND

REQUEST FOR PROFESSIONAL

TRANSFER. STUDY ON A POPULATION

OF FRENCH EMPLOYEES

Liliane RIOUX1

Abstract: The current research aims at analysing the impact of the

workplace attachment, that the National Education employees manifest, on

their decision to request professi onal mutation. 150 French employees were

asked to respond to a questionnaire which comprised three scales, evaluating

the workplace attachment, professional life satisfaction, and the

organisational affective invol vement, as well as a free item evaluating the

perceived distance between the employees’ home and their workplace. The

results show that the attachment to the workplace is a predictor of the

intention to change the working place, which proves t o be, furthermore,

more important than both the level of organisational affective involvement

and the satisfaction of one’s professional life.

Key words: workplace attachment, professional life satisfaction,

organisational affective involvement, request for professional transfer.

1 Department of Psychology, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense, France.

1. Introduction

The researches treating the subject of

place attachment constitute a major

preoccupation of environmental

psychology nowadays. Following the now

classic works of Fried and Gleisher [11],

the researches have increased, and since

the 1980’s, this topic has become more and

more frequent in the environmental

literature [18], [21], [8], [25], thus

progressively favouring the social

dimension of place attachment [22].

Despite a certain terminological and

methodological confusion, that has, very

likely, blocked the advancement in this

research field [19], [13], t he concept of

place attachment has established itself in

the theoretical field, as the excellent

synthesis of Giuliani [14] proves, and it

can reasonably be defined as a p ositive

affective bond between people and specific

places. More precisely, and at the same

time referring to the works of Ainsworth,

Blehar, Waters & Wall [1] and Bowlby

[7], which state that the main feature of

attachment is the desire to maintain

proximity to the object of the attachment,

place attachment would be defined as a

positive affective bond between an

individual and the space where he lives, its

main feature being that of the individual

wanting to transform that space into a

personal one. The affective di mension of

the attachment, little researched upon up to

the present, as compared to the cognitive