Organizational Commitment Profiles and Employee Well-Being: A Latent Profile Analysis

Abstract

The present study examined the influence that employees’ organizational commitment profile has on both work and non-work outcomes. While the nomological network of the three-component model of organizational commitment has been studied widely, the application of the latent profile analysis (LPA) has changed the way researchers explore organizational commitment. Specifically, while variable centered approaches (e.g., correlations, multiple regression) measure each type of commitment independently and ultimately assume the linear relationships detected are applicable to every employee, a person-centered approach (e.g., latent profile analysis) groups individuals according to patterns of the reported target variables, allowing researchers to explore the combined or interactive effects of variables within an individual. Considering that employees engage in both work and non-work roles, the influence of their organizational commitment profile on their non-work experiences warrants exploration. Via replication and extension, this study provided evidence of the cross-sample stability of organizational commitment profiles and examined how employees’ organizational commitment profiles impact their job stress, workplace anxiety, and work interference with family. Using data gathered via online survey platforms (i.e., Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic), this study detected six commonly reported profiles across two samples (N = 342; N = 512). In testing the hypotheses on Sample 2, this study found that, in general, profiles high in affective commitment are associated with the lowest levels of harmful outcomes when compared to profiles high in continuance commitment but low in affective commitment and profiles with very little commitment. The implications of these results on theory, practice, and future directions are also addressed.