Motivating toward organizational commitment: A cross-comparative perspective

Abstract

This article investigates how factors that contribute to the development of organizational commitment can be adjusted to take account of cultural diversity among employees, by taking the mediating effects of motivational processes and leadership into account. Survey data were obtained from two similar organizations in two different cultural contexts—Australia and Iran. The findings showed that both intrinsic and identified motivations and leadership are critical to the development of desirable organizational commitment. The introjected form of motivation was found to be the factor that mediates variances in employee commitment between the two cultural contexts. The current study explains this mediation role by referring to the different degrees to which conformity is salient across the two contexts, thereby providing managers, who are working in culturally diverse contexts, a means of understanding how and why different motivational techniques are more or less likely to contribute to the development of organizational commitment. Furthermore, the present study contributes to the existing literature on organizational commitment by comparing and contrasting the nature and prominence of employee commitment profiles in two different cultural contexts.