Organizational Commitment

The Case of Unrewarded Behavior

Aviad Bar-Haim

• Editorial: WSPC
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789813232174
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Organisational Behaviour

Organizational commitment (OC) is typically thought of in mainstream research as a beneficial behaviour, with employers mutually rewarding employees for their labor. However, in recent decades, there have been many signs that the benefits of OC cannot be taken for granted. The world of work is changing, with organizations downsizing, outsourcing labor activities and restructuring into leaner entities.

Adding to this is the trend whereby almost everywhere, organizations are systematically striving to avoid long-term commitment to their workforce, by resorting to atypical, non-standard jobs (such as part-time work, temporary or agency employment, and other types of insecure jobs). This new regime of employment is an escape from organizational commitment and a tendency to avoid long-term relations.

In this book, the author challenges the mainstream research on OC. Surveying the rise and fall of the idea of OC among corporate managers and employees, in an era of escape from responsibility and commitment, the author redefines OC as unique, unrewarded behavior of a minority of employees in times of trouble for their employing organization. These employees, who have alternatives in the labor market, continue to stay unrewarded with their organizations despite their ability to leave for a more secure and rewarding workplace.

Presenting this new definition of OC, the author addresses theoretical and empirical flaws in the current concept, while returning to an idea of commitment that is more widely used in social sciences: Commitment as a guarantee of fulfilment of obligations, which are neither motivating nor pleasant, but necessary.

Contents:

• A Chronicle of the Concept of Organizational Commitment
• Loyalty: The Forgotten Brick in the Organizational Commitment Construct
• Measuring Organizational Commitment
• Some Research Evidence on Organizational Commitment in its Golden Age
• Organizational Commitment as a Case of Scientific Disarray
• The Escape from Organizational Commitment by Employing Organizations
• Organizational Commitment: A Redefinition
• Empirical Study I of BOC: Voice as a Form of Behavioral Commitment
• Empirical Study II of BOC: EVLFN in Relation to Perceived Employment Alternatives and Perceived Organizational Power
• Empirical Study III of BOC: Further Tests of the New Concept of Organizational Commitment
• Epistemological View of Organizational Commitment

Readership: Undergraduate and graduate students of organizational behavior and organizational commitment, and employers or interested general readers. Organizational Commitment;Work Motivation;Affective Commitment;Normative Commitment;Continuance Commitment;Organizational Behavior;Instrumental Commitment;Calculative Commitment;Side-bets Commitment;Loyalty;Exit;Voice; Compliance-Identification-Internalization0 Key Features:

• Challenges the current state of research on OC
• Suggests new approach and re-definition of the concept of OC as unrewarded behavior, which answers both theoretical and empirical flaws in the current concept, and the changing world of work
• Return the concept of commitment to the normal use by all other social sciences, as a guarantee of fulfillment of obligations, which are neither motivating nor pleasant, but necessary

Chapter 1

A Chronicle of the Concept of Organizational Commitment

The use of the term organizational commitment (OC) dates back to the fifties of the 20th century. A basic concern of managers at that time was cooperation (Barnard, 1938) and willingness to stay and contribute (Simon, 1958). Both perceived the relationships between employees and employing organizations as a formal and informal (psychological and social) contract, in which loyalty and commitment are exchanged for material and non-material rewards. This approach to OC was also held by Becker (1960) in his well-known side-bet theory of OC.

One of the problematical issues at that time in the world of work was the attachment or bonding of employees and employers, in order to secure continuing production of goods and services in a prosperity era. In full-employment labor market, the workforce in the first decades after the Second World War was not easily attached to workplaces. Many of these workplaces were covered by collective bargaining regime or equivalent systems of secured labor relations, which were geared toward industrial peace. Industrial peace was a strategic keystone in attaining economic growth, and all stakeholders in labor relations, including political parties and regulators, were able to institutionalize the employment relations game, where the major players agreed to solve labor–management issues and disputes by negotiation, labor legislation and professional services. The imperative of industrial peace made organizations concerned about the attachment of their workforce. This era of the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, in a way, was a culmination of impressive scientific attainments in social sciences, since the Hawthorne experiments in Chicago in the thirties; the studies on the behavior of the American soldiers in the Second World War (compiled in the series of The American Soldier); the leadership studies in the fifties and sixties, mainly in the universities of Ohio and Michigan; the British studies at Tavistock Institute; the socio-technical movement in England and Scandinavia in the sixties and many other breakthrough projects in organizational behavior. The common denominator in many of these studies was the spirit of the human relations movement, which inspired the intellectual efforts to explore and apply employee well-being at work.

In managing human resources (HR) of the young generation of the post-war workplaces, organizational behaviors, such as absenteeism, lateness and turnover, became a big worry to personnel managers and their higher echelons in the corporation. These behaviors emerged as an important and challenging theme in management science in general and in industrial sociology and psychology in particular. These disciplines were going to merge in this period and create a new science, organizational behavior. Scholars began to look at these behaviors, and in the discourse about attachment entered the term OC as a synonym.

From the intellectual history point-of-view, since the fifties, four views of the concept of OC emerged in the research literature.

The first view defined OC as a calculative-instrumental decision. In the framework of this approach, the focus of the research was on the Individual’s decision to stay or leave his workplace for utilitarian reasons. Accordingly, an employee becomes committed to his workplace because of “sunk costs” (e.g., fringe benefits, salary as a function of age or tenure), and it is too costly for him or her to leave (Becker, 1960; Salancik, 1977; Blau and Boal, 1987).

The second view of OC is a moral-normative approach; in this case, an employee feels moral obligations to remain at his workplace. This obligation steams from the employee’s support of the employing organization’s goals, values and norms.

The third view defines OC as an emotional-identification state, “a state in which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals, and he/she wishes to maintain membership in the organization in order to facilitate its goals” (Blau and Boal, 1987, p. 290; Mowday et al., 1979).

The fourth view defines OC as the opposite of identification, namely, alienation and involuntary compliance as forces of staying in the employing organization. Both alienation and compliance are concepts that were articulated in the works of Kelman (1958) and Etzioni (1961).

These four perspectives of OC evolved unevenly. Over the past 60 years, OC had been associated with terms such as organizational careers, organizational norms, identification, moral, work attachment, job involvement, side-bets and other related terms (Zangaro, 2001). However, the second and third views (moral-normative and emotional-identification commitment) were the most researched and discussed, whereas the definition of calculative-instrumental commitment was slightly changed from side-bets or sunk costs to continuance.

Etzioni equated commitment with attachment and identified three dimensions of it: moral involvement, calculative involvement and alienated involvement, each representing an individual’s response to organizational power. Moral involvement is a positive orientation of high density and is based on an employee’s internalization and identification with organizational goals. Calculative involvement is either a negative or a positive orientation of low intensity and is based on an employee receiving inducements from the organization that match his or her contributions. Alienated involvement is an intensely negative attachment to the organization, for example, the attachment of inmates in prisons, people in concentration camps and enlisted men in basic military training. These people remain in the organization only because they have no other options.

More than two decades later, Penley and Gould (1988) developed a concept of OC that corresponds closely to Etzioni’s approach. Like Etzioni, Penley and Gould started with moral commitment, calculative commitment and alienated commitment. However, their research provided empirical evidence that there are only two predominant bases of OC: instrumental and affective. The instrumental view relates to the system of compensation and rewards received by an individual in return for accomplishments within the organization. The affective view relates to a person’s level of emotional attachment and personal sense of obligation to fulfill duties within the organization. Thus, moral and emotional commitments are treated as affective forms of OC.

The study of Penley and Gould took many years of research and was dominated by a single-dimension approach to OC. The works of Kelman (1958) and Etzioni (1961) set up the path to view commitment as a behavior of identification. However, the most widely accepted conceptualization of OC as an emotional-identification problem was done by Mowday et al. (1979). This group of researchers in the seventies defined OC as the relative strength of an individual’s identification with and involvement in a particular organization that is characterized by three interrelated factors: (1) a strong belief in and acceptance of the organization’s goals and values, (2) a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization and (3) a strong desire to maintain membership in the organization. This definition does not exclude the possibility that a person is committed to other aspects of the environment, such as family and social networks. Additionally, it assumes that an employee who is committed to an organization will display all three of these attributes.

In the nineties of the 20th century, an attempt to codify the research literature on OC has been made by Meyer and Allen (1997), beyond several comprehensive reviews and meta-analyses in the field. Their works and those of other scholars provided strong empirical support for the fact that OC is a multi-focus, multi-base concept. Their concept of OC consists of three components: an affective component (employee’s emotional attachment to, identification with and involvement in an organization), a continuance component (commitment based on the costs that an employee bears by leaving his/her employing organization) and a normative component (an employee’s feelings of obligation to remain at an organization). Meyer and Allen’s model provides a comprehensive explanation to the link between employees and organizations by delineating whether an employee wants to and or needs to and or should remain at an organization.

We can see in Figure 1.1 that in the seventies of the 20th century evolved a small branch of research on OC around the notions of Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Hirschman (1970) and others (Rusbult et al., 1988) noted that citizens, employees and other social groups that perceive deterioration in their social, work, economic or political environment can respond in one of three ways: Exit, Voice (an attempt to change the situation, sometimes by unionization) or Loyalty. The strength of Hirschman’s model is behavioral: commitment is conceptualized in terms of action decisions, namely, doing Exit or Voice or Loyalty. I discuss this neglected brunch of research in the mainstream of OC in Chapter 2.

Figure 1.1.A Visual Summary of Intellectual History of the Concept of OC

In the eighties of the 20th century, the whole picture was changing. The emergence of a new wave of globalization, this time with the driving force of high technology, mainly, information technology, had a crucial impact on the bonds between employees and their employing organizations. The drive to strengthen quality of working life, satisfaction at work and organizational democracy, as safeguards of employee retention, were replaced by polarization of the workforce in most advanced countries between large masses of low-paid workers in low-security jobs, quickly decreasing membership in labor unions and reduction in collective agreements; temporary work and agency employment and other atypical work arrangements replaced permanent employment and secured income from work. The needs and attitudes of employers were profoundly changed. Their concerns were about flexibility, not about attachment. They did not need employee commitment anymore.

The flows of production facilities and services out of local economies and local regions, and the fast mergers and acquisitions of firms and ownerships eliminated any form of long-term mutual responsibility between employers and work communities. What remained in the advanced economies was to tame the grandchildren employees of the first generation after the Second World War to adapt to the new employment relations regime.

Many of them found new industries more suitable to their occupational and career aspirations, with, apparently, less desire for attachment. However, the other masses of workers, without proper and updated human capital, mostly, young poor-educated employees, labor migrants and older lower-class workers found that OC was not reciprocated by the new breed of employing organizations.

These changes are reflected in the decline of OC novelty in research in the last two decades or so. It is not seen in the numbers of research studies. The stream of peer review publications on OC is still several dozens per year. However, no new conceptions of OC and no new research tools were developed. There is a sharp decline in OC research in Western countries, and an increased number of studies in other countries. The important added value of this shift to the field is the cultural differences of the weights of the various dimensions of OC in different countries and regions. For example, in Western countries, the affective dimension of OC is dominant, whereas in some other countries the normative dimension is prevailing.

Chapter 2

Loyalty: The Forgotten Brick in the Organizational Commitment Construct

Loyalty is a concept that has been taken for granted in the discourse of organizational commitment (OC), or even as a synonym. Apparently, the logic is: is it possible to be loyal and not committed? I arrive to this interesting question soon. But before that, let us look in the research database PROQUEST. When searching for titles of scholarly full-text academic studies containing the term Loyalty in their titles, we discover that until June 2016 there were 1,670 items, covering all dimensions of loyalty (interpersonal, political, in marriage, in business and so forth). However, when a search has been narrowed to the title Loyalty And Organizational Commitment, only three (!) articles have been found. In the EBSCO database, with 612 items with the title Loyalty and 213 items with the title Organizational Commitment, this combination has yielded three items as well.

The word loyalty is of course used numerous times in the OC literature to describe commitment. However, it is not a focal researched term there. It is not defined scientifically there, and, as a result, it is not systematically measured in the context of OC. So, the answer to the previous question is NO. Loyalty is not a synonym of OC. It has not even been a concept important enough to be defined and measured in the mainstream of OC research work.

However, observing a well-known related body of knowledge on loyalty reveals a different picture, and I mean the research work around Albert Hirschman’s famous model’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty. This is the title of his book from 1970, and it was elaborated later by Rusbult et al. (1983, 1988), Withey and Cooper (1989) and Wehling and Scholl (1993). The model defines a range of behavioral modes of response in the face of organizational deterioration, or when organizations disregard the needs of their workforce.

1.Exit (active negative commitment);

2.Voice (active positive commitment by participation);

3.Loyalty (passive positive commitment);

4.Fence-sitting or silence — hesitating about the feeling of commitment and passive neutral commitment (added by Wehling and Scholl, 1993);

5.Neglect (passive negative commitment) — staying with indifference to the organization’s problems and its future (added by Rusbult et al., 1988).

These categories of OC have two advantages over previous concepts: they deal with actual behavior, and they do not hold any a priori assumption about psychological states, goals, values or culture of organizations. Individual employees may choose one or more behavioral modes of the above forms of commitment for a variety of reasons, including moral, calculative or affective causes. Hirschman himself was preoccupied with the economic nature of Exit and the political character of Voice, namely, the fight for a change in the system. Other researchers studied the psychological and social characteristics of Loyalty, Neglect and Fence-sitting (Lachman and Noy, 1996; Turnley and Feldman, 1999; Wehling and Scholl, 1993). Of course, choosing Exit, Voice or Loyalty may be related to a variety of reasons, including affective, continuance and normative blend of motives. However, this model is rarely referred to in the mainstream research literature on OC, though, except for Hirschman himself, who was an economi...