Employee Relations

Emerald Article: A closer look into the employee influence: Organizational

commitment relationship by distinguishing between commitment forms and
influence sources
Thomas Jnsson, Hans Jeppe Jeppesen

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To cite this document: Thomas Jnsson, Hans Jeppe Jeppesen, "A closer look into the employee influence: Organizational commitment
relationship by distinguishing between commitment forms and influence sources", Employee Relations, Vol. 35 Iss: 1 pp. 4 - 19
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ER
35,1
A closer look into the
employee influence
Organizational commitment relationship
4 by distinguishing between commitment
forms and influence sources
Thomas Jnsson and Hans Jeppe Jeppesen
Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences,
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this study is to elucidate the relationship between perceived employee
influence and organizational commitment by applying a multidimensional approach that includes
influence perceived to stem from the individual and the team, as well as affective and normative
commitment.
Design/methodology/approach A total of 526 out of a population of 732 employees (72 percent
reply rate) from four Danish companies in different industries and with different types of teams
participated in the questionnaire study.
Findings Results of bootstrapping mediation analyses reveal that a relationship between perceived
influence of the team and affective commitment is fully mediated by perceived individual influence.
Results of multiple regression analyses show a positive relationship between team and individual
influence, and that normative commitment moderated the relationship negatively. The results are to
suggest that influence of the team may stimulate employees individual influence, and in turn their
affective commitment, if their normative commitment is not very high.
Research limitations/implications Generalization of the results to cultures, which are dissimilar
to the Danish should be cautiously considered and further studies are needed to elucidate causality
between the variables.
Originality/value The identification of normative commitment as a variable that can potentially
hinder that employees experience their teams to enhance their individual freedom elucidates the
conditions that may be behind different current findings in the literature. The finding that suggests
that employees need to perceive that they benefit from their teams influence in order to feel more
affective committed to their organization adds to knowledge about team works possible effects for
employee attitudes.
Keywords Employees participation, Employees relations, Teamwork, Organizational commitment,
Normative control, Concertive control, Denmark
Paper type Research paper

A key target within the field of organizational behavior is to achieve a better

Employee Relations
Vol. 35 No. 1, 2013
pp. 4-19
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/01425451311279384
understanding of why and how employees decide to remain with the organization
and involve themselves in the organizations tasks and challenges. Since the 1960s,
the construct of organizational commitment has been developed to grasp this aspect
of the relationship between employees and the organization. The concept of
commitment in organizations refers to an employees attachment to his organization
or to organizational dimensions (Klein et al., 2009). In the early 1990s, Meyer and
Allen (1991), Meyer et al. (1993) integrated the extant literature on organizational
commitment in a three-dimensional concept consisting of affective, continuance
and normative commitment dimensions. The value of organizational commitment is
assumed in the organizational theories and strategic approaches to personnel The employee
management that prescribe employee participation initiatives with the aim of influence
enhancing commitment and performance. As a strategy aimed to increase utilization
of employees resources, some HRM policies have the intention to deal with and affect
the employees mindset and their attitude towards work and the organization.
By implication, enhancing organizational commitment is a key target within HRM
(Guest, 1992; Storey, 1995), organizational theory (Walton, 1985) and high commitment 5
work practices or high involvement management (Gollan, 2005). A central tenet of
these approaches is that employee participation and influence stimulates commitment
and performance. In general, a substantial amount of evidence support this notion
(e.g. Cordery et al., 1991; Laschinger et al., 2004; Lines, 2004; Scott-Ladd et al., 2006;
Rasmussen and Jeppesen, 2006). However, in practice employee participation can have
very different configurations. It can deal with work issues as well as organizational
issues but research suggests that influence on work issues is stronger related to
employee attitudes than organizational issues (e.g. attitudes such as organizational
identification Jnsson, 2006). Employee influence on work typically stem from
delegations of authority to the single employee or whole teams of employees. So far,
little research has included both individuals and teams as sources of employee
influence in the extant investigations of the relationship between employee influence
and organizational commitment. This distinction raises the question about the
relationship between team and individual and a debate has taken place about whether
teams deliberate or oppress the freedom of the single team members (Marchington,
2000), i.e. whether employees experience their teams influence to be negatively related
to their own, individual influence. The power dynamics between individuals and teams
may further have different consequences for the employees commitment. On the other
hand, commitment may be an intermediate variable in this dynamics: commitment has
itself been perceived as a cause of disempowerment of individual members (cf. Randall,
1987), as commitment to organizational goals and values may be a key mechanism in
how teams oppress individual members voice and influence.
We want to contribute to clarification of the issue by investigating the connection
between the employees perceptions of influence stemming from the team and the
individual employee, respectively. Moreover, we investigate the role of commitment in
this relationship, i.e. as both possible intermediary and effect variables.
A better understanding of these issues may have practical perspectives for
participative organizational and work designs that rely on employee influence to enhance
organizational commitment may be improved without unintentionally restraining the
employees influence and, in turn, hindering realization of human resources.

1. Background
1.1 A multidimensional approach to commitment
Meyer and Allen (1991), Meyer (1997), Meyer et al. (1993) attempt to capture
the diversity of the then existing conceptualizations of commitment with their three-
dimensional measure of organizational commitment. Their approach has been the most
applied conceptualization and measurement instrument of organizational commitment
(Cohen, 2007). Continuance commitment is based on an assumption of an economic
exchange between the employee and the organization and it is primarily associated
with turnover cognitions and to a lesser extent with person and organizational
variables (Meyer et al., 2002). Since the present study does not focus on turn-over
cognitions, we found no cause for including continuance commitment in the analyses.
ER Affective commitment encompasses affective attachment, identification and
35,1 involvement with the organization, and designates that the employee wants to be
part of the organization. It is conceptualized as a mindset of desire as affectively
committed employees remain with the organization because they want to do so.
Normative commitment represents a mindset of obligation towards remaining in an
organization, and can stem from both an urge to reciprocate organizational
6 investments into one, as well as be an effect of socialization into cultural norms in
terms of loyalty to an organization (Meyer and Allen, 1991; Meyer, 1997; Meyer and
Parfyonova, 2010). A meta-analysis investigated almost two decades of research on the
three-dimensional model of commitment. The results revealed that affective and
normative commitment are consistently found to correlate with work behaviours such
as organizational citizenship behaviour, performance and attendance, and the
associations of these variables are strongest with affective commitment. There may be
an overlap or at least a strong relationship between normative and affective
commitment since the meta-analysis showed a moderate to high correlation between
the two dimensions. Normative commitment has some of the same antecedents as
affective commitment, but other antecedents are identified as being unique to
normative commitment. Socialization has been suggested to be such an antecedent,
and the importance of socialization is reflected in findings which demonstrate that
tenure and culture have interaction effects on normative commitment (Meyer et al.,
2002). The unique scientific contribution of normative commitment tends to have been
overlooked in commitment research, and a recent refocus on it has been attempted by
Meyer and Parfyonova (2010). The present study attempts to elucidate whether
normative and affective commitment may play different roles related to employee
influence.

1.2 Does perceived influence tighten employees ties to the organization?

Since affective commitment deals with how the employee feels involved and included,
it is relevant to consider whether this dimension can be a consequence of participatory
practices that are introduced with the intention of binding the employee more tightly to
the organization. Employee participation is an approach that aims to enhance
employees influence and/or psychological involvement (Wilpert, 1998), and it has
been approached in different, interrelated terms such as influence sharing (Heller,
2003), empowerment (Honold, 1997), autonomy (Rasmussen and Jeppesen, 2006).
As elaborated, studies have applied the affective dimension of commitment in the
study on the effects of employee influence. In a longitudinal study, Scott-Ladd et al.
(2006) investigated relationships between employee participation and Allen and
Meyers (1990) affective organizational commitment. They found that employee
participation at Time 1 was strongly correlated to organizational commitment at
Time 2 and suggest that participation enhances affective commitment to the
organization and that commitment. Kirkman and Rosen (1999) examined antecedents
and consequences of empowered teams in four US organizations producing textiles
and high-technology manufacturing, as well as an insurance company. They found
that team empowerment was positively associated with organizational commitment
aggregated at the team level. While Kirkman and Rosens (1999) study aggregated
organizational commitment at the team level, another study investigated the impact of
teamwork on the individual employees commitment to the organization. In their quasi-
experimental, longitudinal study, Cordery et al. (1991) investigated employee attitudes
and autonomous teamwork. They compared a greenfield site with an established plant
and found that both workplaces had autonomous teams and traditional work designs, The employee
in which supervisors had decision-making authority over how to organize and perform influence
work tasks. Their results showed that employees working in autonomous teams
were more committed to their organization than their colleagues not working in teams.
The abovementioned studies used the most applied measures of affective forms of
commitment (Mathews and Shepherd, 2002), i.e. the affective commitment subscale by
Allen and Meyer (1990), and scales by Mowday et al. (1979) and Cook and Wall (1980). 7
Thus, the empirical studies show that different expressions of employee influence,
i.e. empowerment or autonomy, are associated with affective commitment.
Thus the results generally imply that experiences of being able to act relatively freely
due to high degrees of influence on work are related to positive affects towards and
a desire to remain within the organization (cf. Meyer and Allens (1991) characterization
of affective commitment as a mindset of desire). The results are theoretically
comprehensible from a perspective of self-determination theory. This theory proposes
that influence on ones environment is the basis of intrinsic motivation and well-being
because it allows a person to engage in activities which are perceived to be joyful,
interesting and/or meaningful (Deci and Ryan, 2000). Meyer et al. (2004) suggest that
these experiences of intrinsic motivation are related to affective commitment. Since the
majority of the reviewed studies adopt a unidimensional approach, the existing research
is inconclusive to the different roles that perceived influence stemming from either the
team or oneself may play for commitment. We suggest that perceptions of individual
influence will be directly related to organizational commitment since organizational
commitment represents the single employees relationship with the organization. This
means that the single employee will evaluate his/her own influence, and not the teams,
when shaping his/her relationship to the organization. However, the team may be
perceived as a source of individual influence on work. Therefore we propose that, to the
extent that the individual employee experiences to gain influence through the team, he
will be more affectively committed.

1.3 Do perceptions of the teams influence tighten the iron cage?

The abovementioned proposition raises the question about whether or not influential
teams in fact do enhance or diminish perceptions of individual influence. Studies from
various countries show that teamwork is positively associated with individual discretion
(Batt, 2004; Geary and Dobbins, 2001; Niemela and Kalliola, 2007; van Mierlo et al., 2006).
In contrast to these findings, researchers have challenged the notion that teamwork is
good for the employee or at the same time good for both the employee and employer.
These researchers present theoretical and empirical studies that support the notion
of teamwork being a management technique that increases managerial control at the cost
of the employees personal freedom (see overviews in Cohen and Bailey, 1997;
Marchington, 2000). Barker (1993) suggests that employee participation programmes is a
de facto means of managerial dominance over workers. He argues that when authority is
located to the team, team members start controlling each others behaviour so that
organizational goals are effectively achieved. By implication, if the team has no autonomy
and management alone has the power to make decisions and sanction behaviour, team
members would not have the capacity to exert control and peer pressure among each
other. In other words, the more influence employees experience the team to have, the less
influence will the single employee experience to have. Barkers (1993) and other studies
have confirmed that single employees ended up with less power after implementing work
systems that applied autonomous teams (e.g. Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998).
ER Another study finds that within the same organizations, some teams can enhance
35,1 team members individual influence while other teams can diminish it. The difference
was that in some teams, team members were able to use team influence to safeguard
each others interests against managerial demands (Townsend, 2007). The empirical
studies of the subject suggest that teams can both be used to enhance a single
members autonomy and can imply domination of the individual member. Hence, the
8 literature may imply that we need to identify the conditions under which teamwork
enhances or diminishes individual influence. Further understanding of the conditions
for individual influence in team-based contexts can be found in Barker (1993). He
identified a process of concertive control, i.e. that team members negotiate consensus
about socially accepted behavioural antecedents in terms of team cognitions, norms and
discourses. These constructs were founded upon the organizations value and norm
system. Barker (1993) also found that employees increasingly identified with the
organizational norm and value system. The team members thus controlled each others in
achieving the organizations goals, thereby suppressing their own needs and interests.
Barkers argumentation is in accordance with notions about cultural or normative
control. This type of control operates via socialization to the organizations goal and value
system. Selection, socialization and other team members peer pressure are mentioned as a
means of internalizing the organizations values and goals. The idea is that when goals
and values are internalized by the employee, autonomy will be applied in pursuing
organizational rather than the individuals own goals (Leifer and Mills, 1996; Thompson
and Wallace, 1996). The concept of normative commitment reflects the internalizing of
pressure to act according to organizational interests. Such pressures can be an attachment
to the goals and values of an organization and a belief about the moral obligation of being
loyal to the organization (Meyer and Parfyonova, 2010). Wiener (1982) characterizes
behaviour influenced by high-normative commitment as personal sacrifice, personal
preoccupation with the organization and persistence beyond immediate reinforcement or
punishment. Based upon these notions, we infer that normative organizational
commitment operates as mechanism in the concertive or normative control process.
In sum, we suggest that perceived influence of the team through perceived individual
influence will have a positive relationship with affective commitment,
but if normative commitment is high, perceptions of team influence will be less
strongly associated with individual influence. By implication, normative commitment
buffers the single employees opportunity to use the team to enhance his own influence
and thus hinders affective commitment to the organization. This suggestion is
formulated in the following hypotheses and graphically depicted in Figure 1:

H1. The teams influence is positively related to affective commitment to the

organization, but mediated by perceptions of ones own, individual influence.

Perceived individual influence

Figure 1.
The hypothesized Perceived team influence Affective commitment
relationships between
perceived employee
influence and
commitment dimensions.
Normative commitment
 H2. The relationship between perceived team and individual influence is negatively The employee
moderated by normative commitment to the organization. influence
2. Methods
2.1 Design and data collection
Four Danish organizations participated in this study. They were selected
because they all used teams which lasted at least one month and were 9
organized with some autonomy and task interdependence. These criteria
are described to be typically applied defining criteria of work teams (Rasmussen
and Jeppesen, 2006).
The organizations differed in their respective sectors of trade and, in this
connection, they used different types of teams: first, Custom Kitchen Co. is a
manufacturing company producing custom fit kitchens. This company applied
permanent teams, and has 480 employees who were predominantly skilled and
unskilled workers. A total of 334 answered the questionnaire (a 70 per cent response
rate); second, Labour Market School is a public company that serves the purpose of
continuation and the supplementary training of industrial workers and workmen. The
sample consisted of 66 out of 89 (74 per cent) skilled and middle-range educated
teachers working in both permanent and project teams; third, Postal Service is a
postal service company based in a larger Danish city. In total 87 skilled and unskilled
employees worked in permanent teams (73 replied to the questionnaire, yielding a
response rate of 84 per cent); fourth, Hi-Tech Co. develops software. The staff is
comprised of academics working in project teams (53 employees out of 73 replied,
yielding a response rate of 70 per cent). In total, the response rate was 72 per cent:
526 out of a population of 732 participated. In the sample, 25.4 per cent were female and
74.6 were males, 34.3 per cent were unskilled workers, 35.7 per cent were skilled
workers, 12.7 per cent had a middle-range education, 10.5 per cent had an academic
education (a masters or PhD degree) and 6.8 per cent indicated that they had another
level of education. By having four different organizations participate, we attempted to
identify common patterns of perceived influence and organizational commitment
across different contexts.

2.2 Measures
Perceived individual influence and perceived team influence perceived individual
(and team) influence used the following questions: How much influence do you
experience that you have (your team has) on [y] How the daily work is
performed?, How the daily work tasks are organized? and How working time
is organized and scheduled? These three issues represent major issues pertaining to
decisions about work (Brady et al., 1990) as they address both doing and organizing
work. By only changing the focus from you to your team, the key difference
between the variables is what agent (individual or team) influences work and not
that team or individual influence differs between decision issues. This approach
ensures that the two variables are comparable and therefore are suitable to elucidate
the question about the relationship (conflicting or facilitating) between what
influence lies with the team or the individual employee. Responses were made on
a five-point Likert-type scale.
Organizational commitment. We applied Meyer et al.s (1993) revision of Allen and
Meyers (1990) three-dimensional organizational commitment scale, which measures
affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment. In the
ER present study, the affective commitment subscale was applied as a criterion variable
35,1 in the regression analyses, and the normative commitment subscale was used as a
moderator variable. Some examples of items were: I would be happy to spend the rest
of my career with this organization (affective commitment) and This organization
deserves my loyalty (normative commitment). We applied a seven-point Likert-type
response scale.
10 Control variables. By controlling for company membership, we attempted to test
relationships between variables without the effects of company-specific differences,
most notably type of team, education and sector of trade. To do so, we computed
dummy variables and entered the regression analyses. 0 represented no membership
with a given organization and 1 signified membership. Since educational level may
constitute a confounding variable that could affect both commitment and autonomy,
we controlled for education. The same procedure was applied for education.
The respondents could specify their education as unskilled worker, skilled worker,
middle range education or academic education. As the number of years within each
educational category could vary, the responses could not form a continuous scale.
Hence, as we did for company membership, we dichotomized each category and made
dummy variables so that 1 coded for the chosen education and 0 coded for no such
education. We also controlled for seniority by asking for the number of years in the
company and gender (0 male, 1 female).

2.3 Strategies of analysis

The study aims to investigate the hypotheses on the individual level of analysis.
In particular, we are interested in the individual employees perceptions of their own
as well as their teams degree of influence. The reason for choosing this level of
analysis also for perceptions of team influence is that we assume that it is the most
appropriate for investigating the hypotheses. In order to elucidate whether or not the
single employee feels his own influence repressed or elevated by the team, we assume
that it is his own experience of the teams influence that is the most important
factor and not an aggregation that include other team members, who may have
different experiences of what their team can influence on the job. Applying
perception of team influence at the individual level thus increases the comparability
with perceptions of individual autonomy and logic of investigation of the relationship
between the two.
We applied a bootstrapping approach (Preacher and Hayes, 2008) in order to
test the mediation hypothesis. The most common approach to mediation analysis,
a hierarchical regression analysis comparing direct and indirect causal steps (Baron
and Kenny, 1986), assumes a normal distribution of the product of the coefficient,
thereby requiring a very large sample. In short, bootstrapping calculates coefficients
from a large number of random samples of the cases in the data set. The confidence
intervals are then estimated by using values at the top and bottom percentiles in
the ordered results of coefficients from all of the random samples. The percentiles
are selected according to the desired level of confidence interval, e.g. the 212 top and
bottom percentile values for a 95 per cent confidence interval. As a result, the
bootstrapping method does not rely on the normality of distribution, and confidence
intervals can be estimated with a smaller sample. In this connection, Type I errors
are less likely to occur when applying this method. We applied Preacher and Hayes
(2008) SPSS macro with 95 per cent confidence intervals and 1,000 bootstrap
resamples.
 Multiple regressions in a hierarchical regression analysis were applied to conduct The employee
the moderation analysis (following Aiken and West, 1991). First, control variables, then influence
the independent variable, the moderator variable and, lastly, the product of the
independent variable and the moderator are added in a stepwise regression analysis
process. The stepwise approach allows for assessing whether the addition of elements
provides a significantly better explanation for the variation of the dependent variable,
i.e. the inserted element has a significant statistical effect. The last step is the 11
interaction terms. If the last step significantly adds to the explained variance of the
dependent variable, the interaction term is related to the dependent variable and
controlled for control variables, as well as the independent and moderator variable.
In that case, the moderator variable does change the relationship between the
independent and the dependent variable. To avoid potential problems with collinearity
among the independent variables and the moderator, both these and dependent variable
were centred (Aiken and West, 1991).

3. Results
3.1 Descriptive statistics
Means, standard deviations, correlations between the continuous variables, and
Cronbachs as of the composite variables are presented in Table I.

3.2 The mediation hypotheses

The results of the mediation analyses confirm H1, which suggests that perceived
individual influence mediates the relationship between perceived team influence and
affective organizational commitment. The bootstrap results show that perceived
individual influence fully mediates the perceived team influence-affective commitment
relationship: the results confirm, with a 95 per cent confidence interval, the existence of
an indirect effect (0.1766, SE 0.0412) from perceived team influence to affective
commitment through perceived individual influence. The analysis estimates a bias
corrected and accelerated 95 per cent confidence interval of between 0.0963 and 0.2619.
The mediation is full, i.e. the significant relationship between team influence and
affective commitment (B 0.21, SE 0.0525, t 4.07, po0.001) is insignificant when
tested in the mediation model (B 0.04, SE 0.0651, t 0.61, p 0.54). The
relationship between perceived team influence and perceived individual influence is
significant (B 0.64, SE 0.0378, t 17.01, po0.001), as is the relationship between
perceived individual influence and affective commitment (B 0.27, SE 0.0618,
t 4.37, po0.001). These results are controlled for the effects of potential confounding
background variables, which are company membership, education, seniority (number
of years in the company) and gender. The descriptive results (Table I) showed

Mean SD 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1. Years in company 10.59 8.80

2. Perceived team influencea 3.58 0.93 0.03 (0.82)
Table I.
3. Normative commitmentb 3.66 1.03 0.11* 0.05 (0.72)
Means, standard
4. Affective commitmentb 4.92 1.06 0.18** 0.17** 0.46** (0.77)
deviations and
5. Perceived individual influencea 3.41 1.01 0.15** 0.63** 0.11* 0.30** (0.81)
correlations among
a b continuous variables and
Notes: Cronbachs as in ( ). One to five response scale; one to seven response scale. *,**Correlation is
significant at 0.05 and 0.01 levels, respectively (both two-tailed) reliability coefficients
ER significant correlations between normative commitment on the one side and affective
35,1 commitment and individual influence, respectively, on the other. To rule out any
possible confounding of the model by normative commitment, we tested the mediation
model, by including normative commitment as a control variable. The results
demonstrated that normative commitment could not explain the mediation effect, as
the mediation was still significant (total mediated effect was 0.1326, with a bias
12 corrected and accelerated 95 per cent confidence interval between 0.0616 and 0.2139).
The mediation paths were significant: B 0.64, po0.001 from team influence to
individual influence, and B 0.21, po0.001 from the latter to affective commitment.
As it was the case with the former mediation model, the mediation was full: perceived
team influence and affective commitment were significantly directly associated in a
model without the mediator (B 0.18, po0.001), and were insignificant with the
mediator (B 0.05, ns).

3.3 The moderation hypothesis

The results of the moderation analysis show that normative organizational
commitment moderates the relationship between perceived team and individual
influence, so that at the higher levels of team influence, the relationship between
perceived team and individual influence is less strong, or in case of negative values of
the coefficient, is stronger in a negative direction. The results of the various steps in the
analysis can be seen in Table II. The latter shows that team influence is strongly
positively related to individual influence (B 0.63, po0.001) and that the relationship
is moderated negatively by normative commitment (B 0.11, po0.01).
The results confirm H2, which states that normative commitment weakens or
makes the relationship between perceived team influence and perceived individual
influence negative. This moderation is depicted in Figure 2. To estimate the turning
point in which normative commitment makes the positive relationship negative,
we calculated the value of normative commitment when the slope in the linear
relationship was equal to zero. When omitting the intercept and moderation and
control variables, the moderation equation is f(x) b1x b2x  m. The coefficient, b1, is

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Labour marked school 1.00*** 0.71*** 0.71*** 0.70***

Hi-Tech Co 0.94*** 0.74*** 0.72*** 0.67***
Custom Kitchen Co 0.27* 0.48*** 0.47*** 0.46***
Skilled worker 0.05 0.02 0.02 0.01
Middle range education 0.06 0.17 0.19 0.19
Academic education 0.32 0.28 0.29 0.31
Gender (0 male, 1 female) 0.11 0.07 0.07 0.06
Years in company 0.03*** 0.02*** 0.02*** 0.02***
Team autonomy 0.64*** 0.64*** 0.63***
Table II. Normative commitment 0.08* 0.08*
Hierarchical regression Team autonomy  normative commitment 0.11**
analysis of the R2 change 0.17*** 0.31*** 0.01* 0.01**
relationship and
moderation of perceived Notes: The dependent variable is perceived individual influence. Regression coefficients are
team and individual unstandardized B-values. Reference categories for the dummy variables are company; postal service,
influence education; unskilled workers. *po0.05; **po0.01; ***po0.001
 5 The employee
Normative
4.75
commitment
influence
4.5
Perceived individual influence
High
4.25 Low
4 13
3.75

3.5

3.25
Figure 2.
3 Relationships between
individual and team
2.75 autonomy for high
(1 SD above mean) and low
2.5
(1 SD below mean)
Low High normative commitment.
Perceived team influence

the main effect (x), and the coefficient, b2, is the interaction effect (x  m). The slope is
then f 0 (x) b1 b2m. When the slope is 0, b1 b2m 03m Cb1/b2, with the
assumption that b2 is different from zero. When inserting the coefficients from
the regression analyses, we find that m 0.63/0.11 5.73. This means that
normative commitment should be 45.73 before perceived team influence is negatively
related to perceived individual influence.
The linear relationship between normative commitment and affective commitment
raises the possibility that affective commitment could explain the moderation
better than normative commitment. To investigate this possibility, we added affective
commitment and an interaction term (affective commitment  team influence) to the
regression model. If the latter would be significant and/or diminish the interaction
effect of normative commitment  perceived team influence substantially,
affective commitment would be the real moderator. However, this was not the case:
affective commitment was not found to be a significant moderator of the relationship
between team and individual influence (B 0.01, ns), whereas normative commitment
was still a significant moderator (B 0.11, po0.01).

4. Discussion
The results show that the relationship between perceived influence of the team and
affective commitment to the organization is mediated by perceived individual
influence (thereby confirming H1). The results also reveal that normative
commitment operates as a moderator for the relationship between perceived team
influence and individual influence (H2). In other words, employees, who experience
relatively higher team influence, also experience higher affective commitment
because they tend to perceive higher individual influence but only for those whose
normative commitment is not extremely high. These results are valid across
company, education, gender and years of employment in the company. The results
were also controlled for possible implications due to the found correlation between
affective and normative commitment.
ER 4.1 Affective commitment as an outcome of teamwork?
35,1 The results show that perceived individual influence mediates the relationship
between perceived team influence and affective commitment. As we have
hypothesized, individual and not team influence is directly related to affective
commitment to the organization. This may be interpreted as an indication that in order
for a team to enhance affective commitment to the organization, individual team
14 members should be able to use a high degree of team influence to obtain a substantial
influence on decisions about work. In other words, in order to enhance organizational
commitment, team influence should function as a vehicle for individual influence and
not as a collective oppressor of its members. The cross-sectional design of the study
does not rule out the possibility of another causal direction in the relationships.
For example, more autonomous employees, who are also more affectively committed to
the organization, may use their personal power in team decisions, thereby increasing
team influence. Even so, studies using intervention (Cordery et al., 1991) and
longitudinal designs (Scott-Ladd et al., 2006) suggest that team influence enhances
commitment and not vice versa. Their results therefore support the former
interpretation of the present study, i.e. that team influence enhances employees
personal freedom and thus their affective commitment. By encompassing both
perceptions of ones own and ones teams influence, the results of the present study
may also integrate the studies, which find individual influence (Mathieu and Zajac,
1990) or team empowerment (Kirkman and Rosen, 1999) to be related to organizational
commitment.

4.2 Normative commitment as contingency of team tyranny

The moderation analysis results confirm that normative commitment can work
as a contingency of team tyranny, i.e. when team influence represses the influence of
the single team member. Thus, the results can be interpreted to provide qualified
support for the studies that show coercive consequences of autonomous teams,
e.g. the case study by Barker (1993) of a company in which the introduction of
self-managing teams developed into an all-pervading, social control and peer
pressure to subvert organizational goals. Barker (1993) explained that the
internalization of social norms was a key mechanism in this so-called concertive
control. The present study specifies this notion by showing that normative
commitment moderates the relationship between team and individual influence.
Because of this, the results justify the present studys assumption that normative
control operates when employees are normatively committed to the organization.
The present study also shows that a very high level of normative commitment is
needed to even cancel out a positive relationship between perceived team and
individual influence. According to our calculations, this would take place for a level
of 5.73 on a one to seven scale. That is a little more than two standard deviations over
the mean of normative commitment in the present study. Thus, we can primarily
expect situations of team tyranny in organizations with quite extreme levels of
normative commitment.
It may, however, have been the case in the study by van Mierlo et al. (2006), in which
they found that the team dominated its single members at extreme levels of peer and
leader support among the hospital employees. The present study suggests that these
employees may reciprocate the high levels of support by developing a high degree of
normative commitment, which would imply that they felt obliged to put the goals and
motives of their work teams over their own interests.
4.3 Different roles of the commitment dimensions The employee
The present study supports the notions of Meyer and Parfyonova (2010), which state influence
that normative commitment is a different construct than the others, and proposes
different antecedents and consequences. The present study specifies that affective
rather than normative commitment is related to perceived individual influence. For this
reason, the present study may contribute to further conceptual precision. There is
a theoretical rationale for the finding that influence is related to affective commitment. 15
The latter is conceived as the mindset in which employees attach themselves to the
organization out of their own desire. The greater freedom of action at work seems
to stimulate a positive affect towards the organization and a desire to remain there.
Contrary to such a perspective of freedom and desire, we identify normative
commitment as a contingency of the situation in which team influence functions at the
cost of the individuals freedom and choice. Operating as a mindset of obligation
(Meyer and Parfyonova, 2010), normative commitment to an extreme degree forces
the employee to subvert to the teams pursuit of organizational goals. Consequently,
normative commitment is shown to possess a dark potential for coercion in the shape
of normative control.

4.4 Methodological issues

Making any generalizations from the results should be undertaken with a certain
amount of caution. As mentioned above, we do not inquire into the causal paths in
the present study. Therefore, we do not know whether highly affective committed
employees are better at seizing participatory opportunities to gain influence within an
organization. In turn, this could increase their perception of team influence. There may
also likely be a reciprocal causal relationship in which affective commitment motivates
the employee to take responsibility via participatory practices, including teams,
thereby enhancing their affective commitment to the organization. As noticed, prior
studies have found an introduction of teamwork to enhance autonomy (e.g. Cordery
et al., 1991), which may also be the most plausible explanation for the relationship
found in the present study. The results which show that normative commitment is a
moderator in the influence relationship may also be interpreted differently than the
interpretation that the team dominates the single employee. Hence, we cannot exclude
the possibility that team members may be unable to use team influence to improve
work conditions and processes in an innovative way because of a very high-normative
commitment to the existing culture and ways of working. Nevertheless, the present
study does identify perceived individual influence as being more directly related
to affective commitment than perceived team influence. Moreover, it shows that
normative commitment moderates the relationship between individual and team
influence, no matter what the causal direction of the two latter variables.
A further perspective for future research may be to inquire into the concept of team
autonomy, which is a team-level construct typically measured as the aggregation of
team members experience of influence on work. Such an approach may complement
the present study and elucidate if collectively shared perceptions of the teams
influence on works plays a role for single team members perceptions of individual
influence and organizational commitment.
The results were found in four organizations which differed in their sector of trade,
education, team type and type of production. This should strengthen the possibility for
generalizing the results between such organizational differences. However, all of the
organizations were located in Denmark, which may limit the generalization of results to
ER the Scandinavian labour market structure as well as its traditions and culture. This is
35,1 marked by a low degree of power distance (Hofstede, 2001), and there are long
traditions for employee participation. The results about affective commitment may
mirror met expectations based on participatory values embedded in the culture.

4.5 Practical implications

16 The findings may have some practical implications. Leaders and team members
may profit from an awareness of the dynamics between influence and commitment
in teams. First, the results cannot be interpreted as an argument against application of
semi-autonomous work teams (cf. Barker, 1993). Rather, teams can operate to increase
the single team members influence on work, and if this is the case, there may be a gain
in affective commitment. Second, an awareness of excessive degrees of normative
commitment may help to counteract situations of team oppression. Since socialization
to organizational culture is a source of normative commitment, one way of weakening
excessive normative commitment may be to encourage that single members deviate
from the predominant culture in team decision making. Team decisions may attempt to
integrate the collective interests of the team with a fair consideration of single team
members interests.

5. Conclusion
The present study finds support for the hypothesis that affective commitment is
related to perceived individual influence, and thus indirectly to perceptions of the
teams influence. Furthermore, normative commitment moderates the relationship
between perceived individual and team influence in a negative manner. The results
showed that a high degree of normative commitment hinders this otherwise positive
relationship, while extreme degrees of normative commitment are found to negate the
relationship, suggesting that team influence has become a source of team tyranny
over its normatively committed members. In general, the results contribute with
further specification to our knowledge about employee influence and commitment.
In particular, the results about the two different roles of normative and affective
commitment in relationships between perceived team and individual influence
underlines the difference between the two often associated concepts.

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About the authors

Thomas Jnsson is Associate Professor in Work and Organizational Psychology. His research
interests include relationships between leaders and employees, influence in organizations and the
employee-organization relationship. He is a member of the research unit Leadership and
Involvement in Organizations (LINOR). Thomas Jnsson is the corresponding author and can be
contacted at: thomasj@psy.au.dk
Hans Jeppe Jeppesen is Professor in Work and Organizational Psychology. He has conducted
a number of studies, including themes such as employee participation, team work, employees
desires for influence. He is head of the research unit Leadership and Involvement in
Organizations (LINOR).

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