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