SUMMARY OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

In organizational behavior and industrial and organizational psychology, organizational commitment is an individual’s psychological attachment to the organization. The basis behind many of these studies was to find ways to improve how workers feel about their jobs so that these workers would become more committed to their organizations. Organizational commitment predicts work variables such as turnover, organizational citizenship behavior, and job performance. Some of the factors such as role stress, empowerment, job insecurity and employability, and distribution of leadership have been shown to be connected to a worker’s sense of organizational commitment.

Organizational scientists have also developed many nuanced definitions of organizational commitment, and numerous scales to measure them. Exemplary of this work is Meyer and Allen’s model of commitment, which was developed to integrate numerous definitions of commitment that had been proliferated in the literature. Meyer and Allen’s model has also been critiqued because the model is not consistent with empirical findings. It may also not be fully applicable in domains such as customer behavior. There has also been debate surrounding what Meyers and Allen’s model was trying to achieve.

Affective commitment is defined as the employee’s positive emotional attachment to the organization. Meyer and Allen pegged Affective commitment as the “desire” component of organizational commitment. An employee who is affectively committed strongly identifies with the goals of the organization and desires to remain a part of the organization. This employee commits to the organization because he/she “wants to”. This commitment can be influenced by many different demographic characteristics: age, tenure, sex, and education but these influences are neither strong nor consistent.

Continuance commitment is the “need” component or the gains versus losses of working in an organization. “Side bets”, or investments, are the gains and losses that may occur should an individual stay or leave an organization. An individual may commit to the organization because he/she perceives a high cost of losing organizational membership (cf. Becker’s 1960 “side bet theory” Things like economic costs (such as pension accruals) and social costs (friendship ties with co-workers) would be costs of losing organizational membership.