Organizational commitment is an important concept in management and a construct on which extensive research exists. This study considers the relationship of the three dimensions of organizational ...commitment (affective, normative, and continuance commitment) with employees' organizational citizenship behavior in a high-unemployment environment. By analyzing the effect of high unemployment on the displacement of the self-concept from individual toward relational and collective levels, this work predicts differences in the effect of unemployment on each of the organizational-commitment dimensions. The results show that in a high-unemployment environment the affective and normative dimensions have a similar behavior than in a full employment environment. Nevertheless, the continuance-commitment dimension increases significantly in a high-unemployment context. These results and the importance of the self-concept in organizational commitment can explain some empirical discrepancies in previous research regarding the relationships between organizational-commitment dimensions and their individual effects on employees' behavior.
This article responds to the call for the identification of a core essence of organizational commitment. Since this call 14 years ago, scholars studying organizational commitment have not come to an ...agreement as to the nature of organizational commitment, and how it develops. The research’s fragmentation creates a problem in a time when practitioners are looking toward organizational commitment interventions to attract, retain, and develop talent and enhance employee performance. With organizational commitment research remaining confounding and fragmented, further clarification of what commitment is and how it develops is warranted and important to guide future research and evidence-based practice. Through a review of the competing and overlapping organizational commitment theoretical frameworks and the empirical research on the consequences of affective organizational commitment, this article proposes a conceptual framework in which affective commitment, or the emotional attachment to the organization, is an important core essence of organizational commitment.
A review of the organizational commitment literature has pointed out several advantages as well as some limitations of the approach advanced by Meyer and Allen (Meyer, P.J. and Allen, J.N. (1997).
...Commitment in the workplace: Theory, research, and application. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.). The advantages include good psychometric properties of the current scales, acceptable discriminant validity of the three dimensions, and research findings that showed the usefulness and acceptable content validity of the three-dimensional approach. Some of the limitations are limited predictive validity, conceptual ambiguity of continuance commitment, and concept redundancy between normative and affective commitment. This paper suggests a conceptualization that builds upon the strengths of the current approaches and minimizes their limitations. The proposed theory contends that organizational commitment is two-dimensional. One dimension is instrumental in nature and the second is affective. In addition, a sharp difference needs to be made between commitment propensity that develops before one's entry into the organization and commitment attitudes that develop after one's entry into the organization. The advantages of the suggested theory and its implications for the understanding of organizational commitment and future research on it are discussed.
It is now well recognized that employees can develop multiple work-relevant commitments, and that commitment itself is a multidimensional construct. Unfortunately, there remains considerable ...disagreement, both within and across work commitment literatures (e.g., organizational, occupational, union), about what commitment is, its dimensionality, how it develops, and how it affects behavior. We argue that commitment should have a “core essence” regardless of the context in which it is studied, and that it should therefore be possible to develop a general model of workplace commitment. We propose such a model based on the propositions that commitment (a) is a force that binds an individual to a course of action of relevance to a target and (b) can be accompanied by different mind-sets that play a role in shaping behavior. We demonstrate how this model helps to explain existing research findings and can serve as a guide for future research and for the management of workplace commitments.
Theories of workplace commitment have become increasingly complex with propositions regarding its multiple-component structure (e.g., affective, normative, continuance) and multiple foci (e.g., ...organization, supervisor, team). To date, most research has taken a variable-centered approach (e.g., regression, SEM) to address the additive and interactive effects of commitment components and foci on behavior and well-being. This assumes that research samples are homogeneous and that the same theoretical framework and empirical findings apply uniformly to employees in general. More recently, it has been proposed that a sample can contain subgroups and that the variables of interest (e.g., commitment components or foci) might combine and relate differently to other variables within these subgroups. Consequently, there has been an increase in the use of person-centered strategies (e.g., cluster analysis, latent profile analysis) to identify and compare these subgroups. We provide an overview of commitment theory and research to demonstrate how use of a person-centered research strategy can provide new insights into the nature and implications of commitment. We also provide a critical evaluation of person-centered strategies with the objective of encouraging greater use of more advanced analytic procedures in future research. Finally, we discuss the benefits of person-centered research for theory and practice.
To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health ...facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance. Parsons shows how the lack of community-based services, a fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic.This groundbreaking book recasts the political narrative of the late twentieth century, as Parsons charts how the politics of mass incarceration shaped the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and mental health policy making. In doing so, she offers critical insight into how the prison took the place of the asylum in crucial ways, shaping the rise of the prison industrial complex.
The increasing complexity of power systems, particularly the high renewable energy penetration, raises the necessity of incorporating detailed power system operation models into long-term planning ...studies. The classic short-term operation model, i.e., network-constrained unit commitment (NCUC), involves many binary variables and introduces computational challenges when applied to long-term planning optimizations. A high-efficiency and simplified NCUC model is required to incorporate operational flexibility in power system planning studies. This paper proposes a linearized NCUC formulation that has a high calculation performance and minor approximation errors compared to the full NCUC model. The proposed model combines the dispatch-only (DO) operation model and clustered unit commitment (CUC) model by introducing linking constraints between them such that the overall model guarantees both the transmission security constraints that are formulated in the DO model and the start-up/shut-down constraints of generating units that are formulated in the CUC model. A case study of a modified IEEE RTS-79 system is provided to demonstrate the validation and efficiency of the proposed simplified NCUC model as well as its effectiveness for power system planning studies.
A unique survey archive of U.S. Army officers’ affective commitment and continuance commitment over a 4-year time period presents an opportunity to test multiple research questions about the extent ...to which organizational commitment profiles change and their relationship with the occurrence and timing of turnover. These results begin to reconcile competing theories about the stability of commitment and complement theories of organizational attachment, withdrawal, and turnover. First, multigroup latent profile analyses revealed the structure of commitment profiles was relatively consistent across five samples from the same organization. Second, latent transition analysis revealed more within-sample and within-person temporal stability of commitment profiles over a 4-year time period than less stability. Third, value-based profiles assessed at one time period were associated with lower turnover rates and higher organizational tenure compared to weak commitment profiles. Likewise, when predicting the timing of turnover with survival analysis, value-based profiles had a lower turnover hazard and higher survival probabilities over time relative to weak commitment profiles. Additionally, employees who transitioned from a value-based profile to a weak commitment profile had a higher turnover hazard and lower survival probabilities compared to employees who moved in the opposite direction. These findings have implications for turnover theories, as well as applied implications for the timing of interventions designed to enhance organizational commitment and reduce turnover.
PDF
