Organizational commitment

In organizational behavior and industrial and organizational psychology, organizational commitment is the individual's psychological attachment to the organization. The basis behind many of these studies was to find ways to improve how workers feel about their jobs so that these workers would become more committed to their organizations. Organizational commitment predicts work variables such as turnover, organizational citizenship behavior, and job performance. Some of the factors such as role stress, empowerment, job insecurity and employability, and distribution of leadership have been shown to be connected to a worker's sense of organizational commitment. employee experiences a 'sense of oneness' with their organization.

Organizational scientists have also developed many nuanced definitions of organizational commitment, and numerous scales to measure them. Exemplary of this work is Meyer and Allen's model of commitment, which was developed to integrate numerous definitions of commitment that had been proliferated in the literature. Meyer and Allen's model has also been critiqued because the model is not consistent with empirical findings. It may also not be fully applicable in domains such as customer behavior. There has also been debate surrounding what Meyers and Allen's model was trying to achieve.

Meyer and Allen's (1991) three-component model of commitment was created to argue that commitment has three different components that correspond with different psychological states. Meyer and Allen created this model for two reasons: first "aid in the interpretation of existing research" and second "to serve as a framework for future research". Their study was based mainly around previous studies of organizational commitment. Meyer and Allen's research indicated that there are three "mind sets" which can characterize an employee's commitment to the organization. Mercurio (2015) extended this model by reviewing the empirical and theoretical studies on organizational commitment. Mercurio posits that emotional, or affective commitment is the core essence of organizational commitment.

AC is defined as the employee's positive emotional attachment to the organization. Meyer and Allen pegged AC as the "desire" component of organizational commitment. An employee who is affectively committed strongly identifies with the goals of the organization and desires to remain a part of the organization. This employee commits to the organization because he/she "wants to". This commitment can be influenced by many different demographic characteristics: age, tenure, sex, and education but these influences are neither strong nor consistent. The problem with these characteristics is that while they can be seen, they cannot be clearly defined. Meyer and Allen gave this example that "positive relationships between tenure and commitment maybe due to tenure-related differences in job status and quality" In developing this concept, Meyer and Allen drew largely on Mowday, Porter, and Steers's (2006) concept of commitment, which in turn drew on earlier work by Kanter (1968) Mercurio (2015) stated that..."affective commitment was found to be an enduring, demonstrably indispensable, and central characteristic of organizational commitment".

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