Forms Of Work Commitment Research Articles

Occupational and Organizational Commitment in Different Occupational Contexts

Although the positive relationship between occupational commitment and organizational commitment has been well documented for occupation-specific and organization-specific studies, there is much less research that documents between-occupation differences in this relationship. Drawing from the occupational subculture literature, the authors offer and test hypotheses about between-occupation differences in levels of occupational and organizational commitment and in the correlation between these two forms of work commitment. Data from the 2005 Korean General Social Survey are used in the analysis. They find that (a) these two forms of commitment, although distinct constructs, are positively related for those in all occupations, with no significant between-occupation differences in the correlations; however (b) occupational commitment is greater for professionals than for managers as well as the nonprofessional cluster of clerical, service and sales, and manual occupations; and (c) managers exhibit greater organizational commitment relative to semiprofessionals and those in the nonprofessional cluster of clerical, service and sales, and manual occupations. In addition, it is only for professionals that occupational commitment is greater than organizational commitment. The authors do not believe that these results are unique to Korean society but argue that research such as theirs on between-occupation differences in work commitment needs to be undertaken in other cultural contexts. Perhaps more important, the impact on work commitment of the conflict between occupational subcultures and organizational cultures needs to be a focus in future research.

Feeling Committed to Work: How Specific Forms of Work-Commitment Predict Work Behavior and Performance Over Time

Previous research revealed that commitment to more specific foci than the organization as a whole is better suited to predict specific employee behaviors. We extend this research by proposing and evaluating specific forms of work commitment that are applicable across a broad range of work situations: work-group, work-content, and work-results commitment. Two studies (N 1 = 16,389; N 2 = 482) supported the distinction between these forms of work commitment, in addition to affective and continuance organizational commitment. Corroborating our predictions, organizational commitment predicted organizational turnover intentions and actual turnover, whereas the three forms of work commitment substantially improved the prediction of self-reported (Study 1) and objective (Study 2) measures of internal mobility and job performance over time.

The theory of work commitment: a facet analysis

PurposeThis study attempts to analyze the structure of work commitment by delineating and classifying the content areas that constitute the conceptual space of the work commitment domain.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on the work commitment literature, the present study considers the identified forms of work commitment, but goes beyond these forms to explore a basic conceptual structure of the domain.FindingsThe findings indicated that multiple commitment measures provide more comprehensive information concerning individuals' work commitment than a single general measure. Specifically, facet analysis provides an important tool for researchers to understand the structure of work commitment.Originality/valueThe multifaceted approach employed in this study enabled the designing and empirical testing of a structural definitional framework of work commitment, which despite growing interest, lacks such a definition. Only two of the three possible facets were examined. Future research may use the complete definitional framework in order to systematically develop an empirical tool that will represent all three facets and their elements.

Career Commitment: A Reexamination and an Extension

Compared to the other forms of work commitment, there is a paucity of research on career commitment. In this article, the authors seek to address this relative gap in the literature by building on previous research on the correlates and antecedents of career commitment and adding “new” variables to the framework. More specifically, they investigate the effects of a few previously studied factors such as job involvement, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, and they add two more individual factors (need for achievement and work ethic) as well as some situational variables (organizational uncertainty/fear of job loss and job fit) that, to the best of their knowledge, have not been investigated in previous research. Furthermore, they examine the effects of extra-work variables (family involvement and number of dependents) on career commitment. Finally, they control for a number of key demographic variables. The authors find considerable support for the hypotheses that job involvement, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction are positively related to career commitment and find some support for a similar effect for need for achievement and work ethic. Furthermore, as predicted, fear of losing one's job was negatively related to career commitment, whereas “job fit” was positively related. The extra-work variables did not have any significant effects on career commitment. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Commitment and Insurance Agents' Job Perceptions, Attitudes, and Performance

Introduction Work describes a number of concepts relating to employee attachment to work related entities. Morrow (1983) has identified five such entities or facets of work commitment: commitment to one's organization, job, career or profession, union, and work values. While these forms of work commitment have received the most attention, other commitments such as those to a community have also been proposed and investigated (Steffy and Jones, 1988). It has been suggested that, since salespeople (e.g., insurance agents) clearly have multiple loyalties, multiple forms of work commitment should be considered within single investigations (e.g., Chonko, 1986; Johnston et al., 1990). Considerable attention has been paid over the years to the qualities of the measures used to tap commitment concepts (e.g., Koslowsky, Caspy, and Lazar, 1990; Mathieu and Farr, 1991), to identifying the antecedents and consequences of these concepts (e.g., Colarelli and Bishop, 1990; Mathieu and Zajac, 1990), and recently to how these forms of work commitment might interact to influence attitudes and performance behaviors. It is the last of these topics that constitutes the focus of this article. Blau and Boal (1987) were among the first to hypothesize how various forms of work commitment might interact to affect work related attitudes and behaviors. Their model crosses high and low levels of organizational commitment with high and low levels of job involvement, producing four types of employees. Their model predicts that job attitudes such as job satisfaction and behaviors such as turnover and absenteeism can be better understood by examining the interaction between organizational commitment and job involvement than by examining either form of work commitment separately. Positioning commitment variables as antecedents is also more consistent with the view that commitment is a processual phenomenon, affecting work related perceptions and outcomes, and not just a consequence of perceptions and attitudes (Johnston et al., 1990; Mowday, Porter, and Steers, 1982; Pinder, 1984; Wiener and Vardi, 1980). Vandenberg and Lance (1992), for example, used a structural equation model to demonstrate that organizational commitment caused satisfaction rather than satisfaction causing commitment. It is also consistent with the social information processing approach (Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978; Staw, 1986), which contends that perceptions and attitudes are highly variable and relatively unstable judgments that are easily influenced by such factors as preexisting attitudes (e.g., levels of commitment). Accordingly, this study examines the effects of commitment, separately and interactively, on the attitudes and behaviors of insurance agents. Agent work commitment is an important issue to the insurance industry because of the difficulty and costs associated with attracting and retaining productive agents and because of the direct impact agents have on the insurer's financial success. Job turnover among agents at independent agencies has been shown to be relatively low, but the loss of an experienced agent can be catastrophic (CPCU Journal, 1991). In the life insurance industry, on the other hand, agent retention from 1988-1990 averaged 19 percent (King, 1992). Life insurance companies are currently emphasizing the allocation of resources for agent training and seasoning, focusing on retention rather than on new producer recruitment (King, 1992). Research on agent work commitment should prove useful to such retention efforts. Because of the nature of the insurance industry, a direct replication of Blau and Boal's model using insurance agents is not appropriate, particularly because not all forms of work commitment are equally germane to the insurance industry. Union commitment, for example, is not applicable to the insurance agent domain. Organizational commitment also has less applicability to insurance agents than to other employee populations, because many insurance agents--particularly independent agents--sell numerous types of policies from several companies; thus, it is less logical to think of an agent's psychological attachment and desire to remain with a particular company. …

Professionalism as a form of work commitment

A modified version of R. H. Hall's (1968, American Sociological Review 33, 92–104) multidimensional measure of professionalism was used to evaluate the concept of professionalism as a form of work commitment. Based on a sample of 325 accountants in public practice, professionalism was examined vis-a-vis three forms of work commitment (i.e., job involvement, organizational commitment, and work ethic endorsement) and four professional behaviors. Results indicate that the measure requires some refinement but is nonredundant with other forms of work commitment. The future role of professionalism is discussed.

Concept Redundancy in Organizational Research: The Case of Work Commitment

A facet design describing the theoretical and empirical interrelationships among five forms of work commitment (Protestant work ethic, career salience, job involvement/work as a central life interest, organizational commitment, and union commitment) is presented. The analysis reveals that these concepts are partially redundant and insufficiently distinct to warrent continued separation. Suggestions for advancing the study of work commitment are rendered.