Employee Commitment

 

In the contemporary business environment, organizations cannot expect to achieve their goals and objectives through without employee commitment. Reporting to work every day is now not a sign of commitment and it is not sufficient. Employees must not only report to work every day, but they are required to think and work smart and show their value to the organization’s management. Organizations ensured employees’ loyalty by providing job security. But in the present trend is job mobility and most employees do not wish to stay in one organization for long. In addition, most organizations are meeting competition by transforming the organization by layoffs and restructuring. Therefore, in the current era organizations must look for new ways to ensure employee commitment.

 

According to Meyer (1991), organizational commitment consist of three factors that consists of active  association  with the  organization,  the predictable  costs  of leaving  the organization and the obligation to remain in the organization. These three approaches are called affective,  continual  and  normative  commitment. Affective commitment focuses on the  employee's emotional attachment to the organization and involvement in its operation, the agreement of objectives of the organization and of the individual. Continual commitment  is the awareness of the  costs associated with leaving the organization. Wiener (1982) suggests that the obligation to remain in the  organization  consists of normative  pressures.

 

The second major development in commitment theory involves recognition that commitment that is targeted to different aspects of relevance to workplace behavior, including the organization, occupation, supervisor, team, program, customer. These commitments can both  complement and conflict but these effects are still not fully comprehended (Meyer & Allen, 1997).

Meyer and Herscovitch (2001) also presented a general model of workplace commitment to which is an extension of Meyer and Allen’s (1991, 1997) three-component model of organizational commitment. The devising of this model was due to increase in the number of studies applying the three-component model to explain commitment to other foci, including occupations (Irving, Coleman, & Cooper, 1997), supervisors and work groups (T. E. Becker & Kernan, 2003), and organizational change (Herscovitch & Meyer, 2002).

Therefore, the main aim of organizations must be to focus on enhancing the level of commitment of employees. For this it is better to completely understand theories presented pertaining to commitment and reflecting these theories in practice.

 

References

Becker, T. E., & Kernan, M. (2003). Matching commitment to supervisors and organizations to in-role and extra-role performance. Human Performance, 16, 327–348

Irving, P. G., Coleman, D. F., & Cooper, C. L. (1997). Further assessment of a three-component model of occupational commitment: Generalizability and differences across occupations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82, 444 – 452.

Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1991). A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment. Human Resource Management Review,1, 61– 89

Meyer, J. P., & Herscovitch, L. (2001). Commitment in the workplace:Toward a general model. Human Resource Management Review, 11,299 –326

Wiener, Y. (1982). Commitment in organizations: A normative view. Academy of Management Review, 7, 418 – 428.

Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1997). Commitment in the workplace: Theory, research, and application. Newbury Park, CA: Sage