Organizational commitment

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In the fields of Organizational Behavior and Industrial/Organizational Psychology, organizational commitment is, in a general sense, the employee's psychological attachment to the organization. It can be contrasted with other work-related attitudes, such as Job Satisfaction, defined as an employee's feelings about their job, and Organizational Identification, defined as the degree to which an employee experiences a 'sense of oneness' with their organization.

Beyond this general sense, Organizational scientists have developed many nuanced definitions of organizational commitment, and numerous scales to measure them. Exemplary of this work is Meyer & Allen's model of commitment, which was developed to integrate numerous definitions of commitment that had proliferated in the literature. According to Meyer and Allen's (1991) three-component model of commitment, prior research indicated that there are three "mind sets" which can characterize an employee's commitment to the organization:

• Affective Commitment: AC is defined as the employee's positive emotional attachment to the organization. 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". In developing this concept, Meyer and Allen drew largely on Mowday, Porter, and Steers's (1982) concept of commitment, which in turn drew on earlier work by Kanter (1968).

• Continuance Commitment: The individual commits to the organization because he/she perceives high costs of losing organizational membership (cf. Becker's 1960 "side bet theory"), including economic costs (such as pension accruals) and social costs (friendship ties with co-workers) that would be incurred. The employee remains a member of the organization because he/she "has to".

• Normative Commitment: The individual commits to and remains with an organization because of feelings of obligation. These feelings may derive from many sources. For example, the organization may have invested resources in training an employee who then feels a 'moral' obligation to put forth effort on the job and stay with the organization to 'repay the debt.' It may also reflect an internalized norm, developed before the person joins the organization through family or other socialization processes, that one should be loyal to one's organization. The employee stays with the organization because he/she "ought to".

Note that according to Meyer and Allen, these components of commitment are not mutually exclusive: an employee can simultaneously be committed to the organization in an affective, normative, and continuance sense, at varying levels of intensity. This idea led Meyer and Herscovitch (2001) to argue that at any point in time, an employee has a "commitment profile" that reflects high or low levels of all three of these mind-sets, and that different profiles have different effects on workplace behavior such as job performance, absenteeism, and the chance that the organization member will quit.

Meyer and Allen developed the Affective Commitment Scale (ACS), the Normative Commitment Scale (NCS) and the Continuance Commitment Scale (CCS) to measure these components of commitment. Many researchers have used them to determine what impact an employee's level of commitment has on outcomes such as quitting behavior, job performance, and absenteeism. However, some researchers have questioned how well they actually assess an employee's commitment, and efforts to improve the validity of these scales, and similar commitment scales such as Mowday, Porter, and Steers' Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ), continues.

In addition to methodological investigations of the validity and reliability of these scales, recent research has focused on determining the cross-cultural validity of Meyer and Allen's measures (do employees in other countries/cultures experience commitment the same way as employees in the USA?), and on expanding the three-component model to other work-related foci (such as commitment to one's occupation, department, organization change initiatives, and work team).

The following references provide a compact overview of the Organizational Commitment literature:

Foundational Works:

Becker, H. S. (1960). Notes on the concept of commitment. American Journal of Sociology, 66, 40-53.

Kanter, R. M. (1968). Commitment and social organization: A study of commitment mechanisms in utopian communities. American Sociological Review, 33, 499–517.

Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1991). A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment. Human Resource Management Review, 1, 61-89.

Mowday, R. T., Porter, L. W., & Steers, R. M. (1982). Organizational linkages: The psychology of commitment, absenteeism, and turnover. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Reichers, A. E. (1985). A review and reconceptualization of organizational commitment. Academy of Management Review, 10, 465–476.

Comprehensive overviews:

Cohen, A. (2003). Multiple commitments at work: An integrative approach. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1997). Commitment in the workplace: Theory, research, and application. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Morrow, P. C. (1993). The theory and measurement of work commitment. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Empirical summaries of research findings:

Cooper-Hamik, A. & Viswesvaran, C. (2005). The Construct of Work Commitment: Testing an Integrative Framework. Psychological Bulletin, 131: 241-258.

Meyer, J., Stanley, D., Herscovich, L., & Topolnytsky, L. (2002). Affective, continuance, and normative commitment to the organization: A meta-analysis of antecedents, correlates, and consequences. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61: 20-52.

Alternate models of organizational commitment:

Jaros, S. J., Jermier, J. M., Koehler, J. W., & Sincich, T. (1993). Effects of continuance, affective, and moral commitment on the withdrawal process: An evaluation of eight structural equation models. Academy of Management Journal, 36, 951–995.

Meyer, J. P., & Herscovitch, L. (2001). Commitment in the workplace: Toward a general model. Human Resource Management Review, 11, 299-326.

O’Reilly, C. A., & Chatman, J. (1986). Organizational commitment and psychological attachment: The effects of compliance, identification, and internalization on prosocial behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 492–499.

Cross-cultural validity:

Cheng, Y., & Stockdale, M.S. (2003). The validity of the three-component model of organizational commitment in a Chinese context. Journal of Vocational Behavior 62, 465–489.

Clugston, M., Howell, J. P., & Dorfman, P. W. (2000). Does cultural socialization predict multiple bases and foci of commitment? Journal of Management, 26, 5–30.

Lee, K., Allen, N. J., Meyer, J. P., & Rhee, K.-Y. (2001). Cross-cultural generalizability of the three component model of organizational commitment: An application to South Korea. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 50, 596–614.

Vandenberghe, C., Stinglhamber, S., Bentein, K., & Delhaise, T. (2001). An examination of the cross-cultural validity of a multidimensional model of commitment in Europe. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32, 322–347.

Wasti, S. A. (2002). Affective and continuance commitment to the organization: Test of an integrated model in the Turkish context. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 26, 525-550.

In Computer Science, organizational commitment can mean something pledged by an organization as opposed to its individual members.