Affective and continuance commitment to the organization: test of an integrated model in the Turkish context

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Abstract

The present study investigated organizational commitment in Turkey, a predominantly collectivist society. A model of antecedents and consequences of organizational commitment was tested, where commitment was conceptualized as composed of two dimensions, affective and continuance. Affective commitment was hypothesized to develop from positive work experiences and to predict desirable outcomes. Continuance commitment, on the other hand, was argued to be culture-bound. In line with Becker (Am. J. Sociol. 66 (1960) 32), it was proposed that in a collectivist culture like Turkey, the normative nature of the employment relationship would generate expectations for loyalty to the organization, and the perceived costs of violating these expectations would be reflected in increased continuance commitment. In particular, it was expected that the endorsement of generalized norms for loyalty to one's organization and informal recruitment would lead to higher levels of continuance commitment.

The investigation involved two phases. In Study I, in-depth interviews were conducted with Turkish employees to develop emic items for the scales of interest. In Study II, the proposed model was tested using structural equations modeling. The results not only confirmed the cross-cultural generalizability of the antecedents and consequences of affective commitment, but also indicated that loyalty norms and ingroup approval increased continuance commitment. The influence of norms and the ingroup was stronger for allocentrics. Furthermore, for allocentrics, continuance commitment was related to more positive job outcomes. The results underline the importance of normative concerns in understanding employee attachment in collectivist contexts and also point to a need for a better measurement of calculative commitment.

Section snippets

Collectivism and organizational commitment

Since Hofstede's (1980) prominent investigation, the influence of cultural values on organizational behavior has been of growing interest to many scholars. Of the four dimensions identified in Hofstede's (1980) original work, individualism–collectivism has received the most extensive theoretical development and empirical validation (Triandis, 1995) both as a cultural variable and an individual difference variable (e.g., Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao, & Sinha, 1995; Wagner, 1995). Indeed, this

Participants and procedure

A fundamental assumption of cross-cultural psychology is that even with perfect translation, instruments that are not developed and standardized in that particular culture will yield distorted data as they will not be designed to capture the “native's point of view” (Triandis, 1992). Accordingly, the first stage of the study involved the generation of emic organizational commitment and antecedent items. The items were generated through in-depth interviews conducted with 83 Turkish employees

Participants and procedure

This phase involved the test of the two-component model of organizational commitment using data from a sample of private sector employees (N=916). The sample comprised of 404 females (45.3%) and 487 males (54.7%). The modal age category was 25–29 years. The sample was highly educated: 74% of the respondents had furthered their education beyond high school. Most of the respondents were office workers (32.5%) and only 8% of the sample comprised of blue-collar workers. Eleven percent of the

Discussion

The major goals of the present study were to explore the influence of collectivist values on the nature of organizational commitment as well as to evaluate the generalizability of the findings in the Western literature with respect to the dimensionality, development and consequences of commitment. Most of the research on organizational commitment has focused on affective commitment and this type of commitment has been validated across various samples (e.g., Ko et al., 1997). Indeed, this study

Limitations and future research directions

The present investigation addresses a dearth in the organizational commitment literature by attempting to portray the influence of cultural values on the attachment process. The study employed sound cross-cultural methodology and the proposed model was tested rigorously, by taking into account both antecedents and outcomes of two dimensions of commitment. Nevertheless, the cross-sectional, single-country, survey research design has inherent weaknesses and some of the findings are not as strong

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the author's dissertation. The author would like to acknowledge the exemplary supervision of her thesis advisor Harry C. Triandis as well as the invaluable guidance of Fritz Drasgow. Further acknowledgment is due to the Office of International Studies and the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their financial support.

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