Conceptualization and validation of organizational commitment

Abstract

We reviewed the key measurement and conceptualization problems of the Allen and Meyer's (1990) three-component model (TCM) of organizational commitment (OC), and established an unequivocal grounding of the OC concept which Korean workers perceive. To that end, we examined internal structures of OC construct and validated it in the context of workers in Korean domestic banks. Overall two studies were conducted with data collected from a sample of 519 full time workers of seven domestic banks in Korea. While affective (AC) and continuance commitment (CC) were measured using scales of the TCM as customized, normative commitment (NC) was measured using the six-item scale (Jaros, 2007) according to the researcher's hypotheses on conceptualization of OC. In study 1, measures of the 290 respondents were analyzed using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). There were two phases scrutinizing factor structures of the OC scales. First, ESEM was conducted on the items of OC scale, and on the items measuring other constructs (assumed to be similar to OC or antecedents of OC). The result revealed that, contrary to our expectation, a unidimensional model of AC consisting of 10 items as indicators including six items of the AC construct and four items of the NC construct, fit the data best. In study 2, measures of the rest 229 respondents were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to confirm the model developed in study 1. The result revealed that the unidimensional model of AC fit the data better than the other two-factor (AC, NC) and three-factor(AC, NC, CC) models. We concluded that the construct of OC for Korean bank workers, especially domestic bank officers can best be understood as a singular construct of affective dimension which is newly conceptualized and validated through the current study. Such a result was interpreted in light of the organizational cultural value orientations in Korean domestic banks. Implications for OC theory and its application were discussed concerning the present results.