Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Chapter 3
by 179.6.168.31 on 06/27/23. Re-use and distribution is strictly not permitted, except for Open Access articles.
Measuring Organizational
Organizational Commitment Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
Commitment
Among several research tools, two instruments are at the core of empirical
research on organizational commitment (OC). One is the Organizational
Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) that was developed by Mowday et al.
(1979). The second tool is the three-dimensional OC, developed by Allen
and Meyer (1990).
A 15-item OCQ was developed by Porter et al. (1974) and codified by
Mowday et al. (1979). They interviewed 2,563 employees in nine widely
diverse work organizations over a nine-year period. Job classifications of
those interviewed included public employees, classified university
employees, hospital personnel, bank and telephone company employees,
scientists and engineers, auto company managers, psychiatric technicians
and retail management trainees. Cook and Wall interviewed 650 United
Kingdom blue-collar workers in two separate studies. The samples were
composed of full-time skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled male workers in
manufacturing industries.
Cook and Wall (1980) developed a shorter nine-item version scale,
adapted from the longer OCQ, designed for a working-class population. It
was supposed to capture three of the following interrelated dimensions:
(a) acceptance of the organization’s values (identification), (b) willingness
to exert effort on behalf of the organization (involvement) and (c) a desire
to remain an employee of the organization (loyalty).
13
3. I am not willing to put myself out just to help the organization (R).
4. Even if the firm were not doing too well financially, I would be reluc-
tant to change to another employer.
5. I feel myself to be part of the organization.
Organizational Commitment Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
6. In my work I like to feel I am making some effort, not just for myself
but for the organization as well.
7. The offer of a bit more money with another employer would not seri-
ously make me think of changing my job.
8. I would not recommend a close friend to join our staff (R).
9. To know that my own work had made a contribution to the good of
the organization would please me.
measures of OC: identification on the first factor and loyalty on the second
factor. They interpreted this as a distinction between passive and active OC,
hidden in the original scales, that could prove useful in understanding the
behavior of different populations of industrial workers.
Organizational Commitment Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
12. One of the major reasons I continue to work for this organization
is that leaving would require considerable personal sacrifice.
· Normative Commitment Scale Items:
13. I do not feel any obligation to remain with my organization (R).
14. Even if it were to my advantage, I do not feel it would be right to
by 179.6.168.31 on 06/27/23. Re-use and distribution is strictly not permitted, except for Open Access articles.
leave.
15. I would feel guilty if I left this organization now.
16. This organization deserves my loyalty.
17. I would not leave my organization right now because of my sense
Organizational Commitment Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
of obligation to it.
18. I owe a great deal to this organization.
1
Rokeach’s scale is based on rank-order values, which results in statistical problems
(Edwards, 1994). In the McDonald and Gandz’s revised version, the values are rated rather
than rank-ordered.
2
However, I could not avoid the curiosity about the factor structure of the values set in my
study (see later). Therefore, I applied the same factor analysis as Finegan did and more
(I explored three, four and the maximum five factor solutions that I had in my data), and
I also applied a non-metric Guttman–Lingoes smallest space analysis (SSA), but failed to
reconstruct her four-factor structure of values.
satisfaction and fairness perceptions, and all the three variables were
related to OCB in a meta-analysis on 55 studies by Organ and Ryan
(1995)).
Numerous studies define OCB as a category of extra-role behavior, or
Organizational Commitment Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
3
The often-cited five dimensions of OCB, namely, altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy,
sportsmanship and civic virtue, are rarely fully used in concrete research works or in
standard forms. So, there is a significant gap between this extra-role category and its
measurement.
OCB exists outside of the domain of traditional behavior that “gets the
job done”, yet citizenship behavior is still an important element of an
employee’s overall contribution to an organization. This remark is appro-
priate for OC as well. Employees may engage in behaviors that are benefi-
Organizational Commitment Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com