On assessing measures of work commitment

Abstract

Research interest in worker commitment has been so high as to generate over 25 concepts/measures since 1956 (Morrow, 1983). While the idea of devotion, loyalty, or commitment to work may appear unidimensional, inspection of the definitions and operationalizations of these concepts/measures reveals a wide range of intended meaning. For example, among the most frequently used forms are (1) the protestant work ethic (the belief that hard work is intrinsically good and an end in itself; Mirels and Garrett, 1976), (2) career salience (the importance of work and a career in one's total life; Greenhaus, 1971; Greenhaus and Simon, 1977), (3) job involvement (the degree of daily absorption an individual experiences in work activity; Lodahl and Kejner, 1965), (4) work as a central life interest (an individual's preferred locale for carrying out activities; Dubin, 1956; Taveggia and Ziemba, 1978), and (5) organizational commitment (the extent to which an employee desires to remain in an organization, exert effort on its behalf, and believes in and accepts the organization's values and goals; Mowday, Steers and Porter, 1979). These concepts are clearly not equivalent in intended meaning; yet a recent facet analysis of work commitment has argued that these measures are at least partially redundant (Morrow, 1983). Possible explanations for this proposed redundancy include the fact that there is considerable interchange of the use of the words job and work within the various measures of commitment (Kanungo, 1982), with the exception of organizational commitment (see Table 2). A second possibility involves the reliability estimates for the various measures of commitment. Protestant work ethic, job involvement and organizational commitment have produced generally acceptable reliability estimates (0.70 to 0.90), but work as a central life interest has been found not to be internally consistent (Maurer, Vredenburgh and Smith, 1981). Few reliability assessments have been reported for career salience (Morrow, 1983). Finally,