Correlates and predictors to organizational commitment in China.

• Author: Peterson, Douglas K.
• Position: Report

ABSTRACT

Managers need to be able to understand whether the constructs of organizational commitment apply cross culturally. This study adds to a growing knowledge base regarding organizational commitment internationally, and uses workers in government controlled, mixed economy, and privately owned businesses in China's interior. The study uses questionnaires of antecedents of commitment and tests Mowday et al's (1979) OCQ and Meyer and Allen's (1991) ACS, NCS, CCS. While we were are able to verify some antecedent conditions surrounding Mowday et al (1979) and Meyer and Allen's (1991) commitment measures, we discovered the conditions surrounding commitment in persons who live outside the commercial zones may be more complicated than theory predicts. Artifacts that may modify antecedent-commitment main include culture, language, firm ownership/control, and expectations of workers moving from government employment more market based jobs. We suggest that more study is required in relationship to conceptual space, theory development, measurement, validation, and analysis in former centrally planned and communistic countries. As is usually true in China, things are not as straightforward or simple as they seem. This study seems to verify that sentiment.

Keywords: Commitment, International Management, China

INTRODUCTION

During the past 21 years there has been significant development in the conceptualization, refinement, and measurement of organizational commitment (Mowday et al 1979; Meyer and Allen 1984, 1991, 1987, 2001; Allen and Meyer 1990). Basically, there are two main conceptualizations in the literature. In each, there are three distinct psychological states associated with commitment. In Mowday et al's (1979), the three psychological states are attachment and positive feeling (affective commitment), desire to be motivated produce work behavior (behavioral commitment), and desire to feel loyal and stay with a particular organization (continuance commitment). The psychometric properties of the 15 and 18 item Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, or OCQ (Mowday et al 1979), have been very good, and there have been a great many publications using this conceptualization of commitment. In fact, a March 2006 search of the literature on JSTOR yielded 464 journal articles testing the antecedents of commitment, the constructs of the instrument itself, and the consequences of high and low commitment including organizational citizenship behavior, union certification, adaptive behavior, and turnover/turnover intention. Of these 464 articles, approximately 5.1% had an international focus, with workers in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Russia, and Norway coming under the most frequent scrutiny.

More recently, Meyer and Allen (1991) developed a slightly different conceptualization of organizational commitment. In this conceptualization, there are also three psychological states to commitment. First, there is an emotional attachment called affective commitment which results from receiving feedback, participation, equity, feeling important to the firm, organizational dependability, peer cohesion, management receptiveness to input, goal difficulty, goal and role clarity, and job challenge. Second, there is recognition of the costs associated with leaving an organization. This continuance commitment is conceptualized by the alternatives available, the anchoring a person feels in a community, whether pensions/benefits are transferable, sunk costs that could be lost, the necessity of relocation, the educational sufficiency of a current versus one outside the firm, the specificity of educational attainment, skill transferability, dependence on the organization, and the development of job specific skills that may or may not transfer. Finally there is a perceived obligation to stay with an organization. This normative commitment is a much more difficult conceptualization. It is measured through assessing normative states of loyalty, moral obligation, ethical matching between subject and organization, values, longevity, and sensibility. Reliability measurements Meyer and Allen's organizational commitment have also been very good in the 6 item scale testing affective, continuance and normative commitment. In fact, the ACS, CCS, and NCS have been extensively tested (Meyer and Allen 2001) and the construct validity of commitment measures is well documented (Allen and Meyer 1990).

In their review of research pertaining to the organizational commitment model, Allen and Meyer noted that most studies were conducted in Canada and the United States. A recent review in March 2006 on JSTOR yielded a somewhat similar 3.5% measurement in different cultures. In both cases with Mowday et al (1979) and Meyer and Allen (1991) conceptualization, instrumentation, and validity have occurred in the markets closest to the authors, the United States and Canada, while researchers gradually explored the conceptualization, generality, measurement and validity in an international setting as opportunity became available and the need became more prescient.

Since then, there have been several studies that examine the model in different cultures.

This article speculates there can be a great deal more research done in the international environment in terms of understanding the constructs of commitment as well as the contextual items surrounding conceptualization, measurement, and interpretation.

Generally, it appears there are many articles that use Mowday et al's (1979) OCQ and Meyer and Allen's (1991) ACS, NCS, and CCS. There are others who use neither (Chen et al 2002). In Meyer and Allen's (1991) measurement, there have been some issues with cross cultural measures relating to the construction of NCS and CCS (Lee et al 2001). While these issues were resolved though additional translation and construction of the scales, there may have been reasons relating to language or translation (Triandis 1983), faulty generalization (Triandis 1983), cultural fluency (Hulin 1987) and cultural relevance (Ko et al 1997). It would seem that additional research is necessary to investigate the cross cultural validity of commitment models, and whether they measure accurately, or whether there are additional considerations that researchers should consider, like translation artifacts, cultural relevance, and construct generality in the cross cultural environment. This study attempts to fill that void.

We conducted measurement in an urban area in the Peoples' Republic of China, outside of the main commercial zones of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. The study is unique because it examines antecedents to commitment as identified in literature. It then utilizes both Meyer and Allen's (1991) measure of commitment as well as Mowday et al's. It is hoped that this study can add to our understanding of commitment in the international environment. The study adds to our knowledge through comparison, and also adds to previous work by Ko et al (1997) and Lee et al (2001) by measuring in a centrally planned economy. If there is support for the application of the ACS-NCS-CCS model, or the OCQ model, it is possible that our understanding of the antecedents of commitment can be validated in China. If that support is only partial, or non-existent, it may be possible that there are artifacts relating to translation, sampling, culture, and relevance that may have been predicted by Chen et al (2002), there may be a question with the scale items as suggested in Lee et al (2001), there may be a problem with construct validity, a problem with context, a problem with translation, or even a problem with an entire model. The theoretical contribution of this paper is to validate the antecedent conditions of commitment in China, and if required, suggest that these constructs may need to be changed, or at the very least interpreted or understood differently.

THE STUDY OF JOB ATTITUDES IN CHINA

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

Organizational Commitment is the relative strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization (Meyer and Allen 1987; Mowday et al 1982). According to Mowday et al (1982) commitment is conceptually characterized by (1) the strong belief in and acceptance of organizational goals and values; (2) a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization; and (3) a strong desire to maintain membership in the organization (Mowday Porter and Steers, 1982). Alternatively, Meyer and Allen (1991) characterize commitment as a tripartite psychological state where there is an emotional attachment to organizational (affective commitment) recognition of the costs associated with leaving an organization (continuance commitment) and a perceived obligation to stay with an organization (normative commitment).

In China and elsewhere commitment is characterized as an attitude of attachment to an employing organization. Researchers focus primarily on the identification of antecedents contributing to the development of organizational commitment and the impact on job attitudes and behavior that commitment may have (Meyer and Allen, 1987). According to Angle and Lawson (1993) there are antecedents to commitment that can be split into components of personal characteristics and situational factors. Personal characteristics include variables like gender, age, and employment tenure. Situational factors include variables like job characteristics, organizational characteristics, work situations, and work experiences that employees may have.

There has been a great volume of work relating to organizational commitment in the academic literature. Recent reviews of the commitment research (Reichers 1985; Mathieu and Zajac 1990; Meyer and Allen 1987, 2001) reveal that most research relates to the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of organizational commitment. Outside of the primary geographic base, which is located in the United States, Canada, Asia, and...