Where does organizational commitment collide?

Meyer and Allen argued in 1991, in Human Resource Management Review, that the literature had filed three different bonds under the single name organizational commitment, and they separated them into components. Affective commitment is an emotional attachment to the employer, so that a person stays because they want to. Continuance commitment is an awareness of the costs of leaving, so that a person stays because it would be expensive to go. Normative commitment is a felt obligation, so that a person stays because they believe they ought to. The measurement scales came from Allen and Meyer in 1990. All three predict lower turnover, yet they name almost opposite reasons for staying, which is the point of this page: unlike the other meanings here, this one holds the incompatible reasons together as named parts of a single model rather than choosing one.[1][2]

Unit

A score on each of three components for one employee

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The Affective, Continuance, and Normative Commitment Scales, questionnaire items scored per component

Mowday, Steers, and Porter fixed the attitudinal version in 1979, in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, and treated commitment as a single global attitude. They defined it as the strength of a person's identification with and involvement in an organization, and captured three facets under one construct: a strong belief in the organization's goals and values, a willingness to exert effort on its behalf, and a strong desire to keep membership in it. Their fifteen-item Organizational Commitment Questionnaire scores all three as one dimension, so a single number stands for the whole bond. This meaning is close to what the three-component model later split off as affective commitment, but here it is not split at all: unlike the model above, it refuses to separate the reasons and unlike the side-bet meaning below, it locates the bond in an attitude rather than in accumulated costs.[3]

Unit

One overall attitude score for an employee

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The fifteen-item Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, summed to a single score

Becker proposed in 1960, in the American Journal of Sociology, that commitment is what happens when a person has staked something of value on continuing a line of action, so that stopping would forfeit it. He called these stakes side bets: a pension that vests with tenure, a reputation built in one place, skills that do not transfer, a family settled near the job. On this account commitment has nothing to do with liking the employer or believing in its goals; it is a structural position a person is in once the accumulated stakes are large enough. This is the calculative meaning that the three-component model later renamed continuance commitment. It stands almost opposite to the attitudinal meaning: unlike the OCQ, where the bond is a positive attitude, here the bond is a cost of exit, and a person can be highly committed while wanting badly to leave.[4]

Unit

The size of the stakes forfeited by leaving

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Later operationalised through perceived costs and lack of alternatives, or continuance-commitment items

O'Reilly and Chatman argued in 1986, in the Journal of Applied Psychology, that commitment should be defined by why a person is bound to the organization, not by how strongly, and they distinguished three bases of psychological attachment. Compliance is instrumental involvement for specific external rewards, identification is attachment based on wanting to affiliate with the organization, and internalization is attachment based on shared values. Two people with the same overall commitment score can be attached for these different reasons, and the reasons predict different behaviour, with compliance behaving unlike the other two. This meaning grows from a behavioural tradition in which commitment binds a person to their past conduct rather than to a workplace. Unlike the three-component model, which sorts reasons for staying, it sorts the psychological grounds of the tie itself, and unlike the OCQ it denies that one summed attitude captures the bond.[5]

Unit

The basis of attachment behind an employee's involvement

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Items separating compliance, identification, and internalization