International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies ISSN 2028-9324 Vol. 7 No. 4 Aug. 2014, pp. 1465-1474 © 2014 Innovative Space of Scientific Research Journals http://www.ijias.issr-journals.org/ Corresponding Author: Kamran Khattak 1465 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERCEIVED ORGANIZATION SUPPORT AND AFFECTIVE COMMITMENT OF HOSPITAL NURSES IN PAKISTAN: A MEDIATIONAL MODEL Kamran Khattak, Samar Inderyas, Zohaib Hassan, and Atif Ali Raza MS (HRM), Mohammad Ali Jinnah University Islamabad, Pakistan Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship of perceived organization support, affective commitment and organization based self esteem of public sector nurses in Pakistan. The research was conducted in twin cities Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The primary data was collected with the help of survey through personally administered questionnaires from 300 respondents in a non-contrived environment during January 2013, it was a cross sectional study. Both male and female respondents were included in the study. Results of this study revealed that perceived organizational support has a significant positive association with both affective commitment and organizational based self esteem. Meanwhile, organization based self esteem perform a mediation role between perceived organizational support and affective commitment. KEYWORDS: perceived organizational support, organizational based self esteem, affective commitment. 1 INTRODUCTION In early 1990’s perceived organizational support was not focal point for researchers but from last few years the research on this topic has been flourished [1]. But some researchers have presented in mid 1980s’ the organizational support theory focus on perceived organization support as a felt obligation [2]. The perception that the organization worth one’s contribution and is concerned about one’s well-being manifest the needs for esteem, membership, emotional support and endorsement [3]. These emotional rewarding practices may lead workforce to recognize the organizations’ welfare with their own and believe to be emotionally committed to the organization. The model of perceived organizational support refers to the extent to which its employees contribution are being valued by the organization [4] and concerned about the welfare depict the social exchange link between the company and the workers. Absenteeism and turnover [2] was negatively associated with perceived organizational support. In early 1950s organizational commitment was commenced in the field of organizational behavior and since now it is the most interesting topic for researchers [5]. Fredrick Herzberg two factor theory of motivation regarding commitment was noteworthy [6]. Previous work in this field found that managers’ beliefs that the organization identify their involvement and could be dependent on to complete promises were optimistically connected with affective commitment [7]. Recently Cohen [8] revealed that organizational dependability increases affective commitment. This emotional involvement emerges from equality, support from senior employees’ and social group moreover value individual worth and participation [9]. Individuals’ recognition and participation in the organization emphasizes on affective [10]. Employees with the positive affective commitment prolong work in organization as they are willing to do so [11]. Pierce et. al [12] classified organizational based self-esteem as the extent to which employee believes he/she to be competent, considerable and valuable as a member of organization. Purang [13] examined the relationship of perceived organizational support and organizational commitment through organizational based self-esteem from a social identity perspective. The focus of this study is to find out the relationship between perceived organizational support and affective commitment and the mediating role of organization based self- esteem on private sector nurses of Pakistan. The main focus of this research is that, less work has been done in this field. Researchers have mostly worked on organizational commitment whereas this study focuses on one component of