ORGANISATIONAL COMMITMENT:

Organisational commitment is employee’s commitment to the organisation. It has two facets; one the organisation’s perspective and the other employee’s. Commitments develop naturally.
Commitment can be in form of the nature of relationship between an employee and the organisation or relationship to a variety of entities. Commitment can be observed as an attitude or mindset (attitudinal commitment) where the commitment arises due to convergence of goals and values and develops prospectively. Commitment can be behavioral where it develops post membership in retrospect which facilitates rationalization of continuance in an organisation or a course of action.

Organisational commitment has been defined as “a psychological state that characterizes an employee’s relationship with an organisation and has implications for the decision to continue membership of the organisation” (Meyer and Allen 1991).
There are three components of organisational commitment. 1. Affective commitment refers to employee’s identification, or strong emotional attachment and involvement in the organisation. 2. Continuance commitment refers to an awareness of the costs associated with leaving the organisation. 3. Normative commitment reflects an obligation to continue with the organisation.
Although, initially literature suggested the presence of a second classification of commitment in form of compliance, identification and internalization (o’rielly, chatman and Caldwell 1991); it is now considered that identification and internalization are mechanisms through which commitment develops (Meyer and Allen 1997). Thus commitment is a multidimensional construct.
Usually Commitment is viewed as commitment to an organisation represented by the top management and its goals and values (Meyer and Allen 1997; reichers 1986). However commitment can be to multiple entities since organisations can be viewed as a coalition of groups and the groups can be nested (Lawler 1992). This multiple constituency frame work is useful if the intention is to measure commitment to a set of groups in an organisation. Commitment as a construct is distinct from other work commitment constructs such as job involvement, work ethic, work group attachment etc (Meyer, Allen and Smith 1993).

Most of the empirical studies have concentrated on the effects of affective commitment and some on continuance commitment. Research on affective commitment has been the least (Meyer and Allen 1997). Research evidence shows that all the three components of commitment are negatively related to employee turnover, intention to leave (Allen and Meyer 1996). Affective commitment has been found to be negatively correlated to voluntary absence from work (Meyer et al 1993; Somers 1995); positively related to better work performance as measured by both self reported measures( Meyer et al 1993) and objective measures( bashaw and grant 1994). Employees have been shown to focus their commitment to activities which they believe to be valued by organisation (as indicated by information put out by organisations) or are valuable to organisation (shim and steers 1994). The effect of commitment on performance is only to the extent that it is unconstrained by ability (competence) or access to resources (angle and Lawson 1994) and control over outcomes (decottis and summers 1987).
Continuance commitment has been shown to have no significant relationship with voluntary absence from work (Somers 1995).
Commitment has usually been studied as an individual level variable. Studies have also looked at commitment as an organisation/ group level variable. Ostroff (1992) showed that aggregation of commitment scores of individuals is meaningful when there has been consensus among members of the group. The correlation between commitment at group level and performance has shown to be stronger than what was seen at individual level. Such aggregation is more appropriate when performance is a result of highly interdependent activities of individuals (ostroff 1993).

People with high affective commitment have been shown to actively do extra role or organisational citizenship behaviors. These behaviors go over and above work related behavior as dictated by job description and organisational policy. They include providing extra help to co workers, being considerate, volunteering for special activities, and making suggestions when problems arise (Meyer and Allen 1997).

Commitment has been found to be related to the way employees respond to dissatisfaction at work. High affective commitment was positively correlated to with willingness to suggest improvements, accept things as they are and negatively correlated with tendency to withdraw (Meyer et al 1993).

Antecedents of affective commitment:

These can be classified as organisational characteristics; person characteristics and work experience. Generally it has been seen that, employees in forming attitudes about organisations are more tuned to day to day work experiences and are less focused to macro variables.

Although some studies have shown decentralization to result in higher affective commitment, however the evidence is neither strong nor consistent (Mathieu and Zajac 1990). Significant positive correlation has been reported between perceptions of fairness (organisational justice) and affective commitment (Kim and Mauborgne 1993).
Research on person characteristics has shown that gender, marital status and educational achievements and affective commitment are unrelated (Mathieu and zajac 1990). A weak positive relation with age, organisational tenure and perceived competence has also been reported (Mathieu and zajac 1990).

Affective commitment has been found to be positively correlated with job challenge, degree of autonomy, and skill diversity of employees (Mathieu and zajac 1990; Dunham, grube and Castaneda 1994), participation, leader consideration and supervisory support (Rhodes and steers 1981; decottis and summers 1987; mottaz 1988). Studies have also shown that affective commitment is negatively related to role ambiguity or role conflict (Mathieu and zajac 1990).