Location, location, location: Contextualizing workplace commitment

• Published date: 01 May 2016
• Date: 01 May 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2094

Location, location, location: Contextualizing

workplace commitment

S. ARZU WASTI

1

*, MARK F. PETERSON

2

, HEIKO BREITSOHL

3

, AARON COHEN

4

,

FRANCES JØRGENSEN

5,6

, ANA CAROLINA DE AGUIAR RODRIGUES

7

,

QINGXIONG WENG

8,9

AND XIAOHONG XU

10,11

1

School of Management, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey

2

Department of Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

3

Schumpeter School of Business and Economics, Wuppertal University, Wuppertal, Germany

4

Division of Public Administration, School of Political Science, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

5

Department of Business Administration, School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

6

Faculty of Management, Royal Roads University, Victoria, Canada

7

School of Economics, Business and Accounting, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

8

School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

9

UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

10

Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, U.S.A.

11

Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, OH, U.S.A.

Summary The purpose of the present commentary is to discuss the nature and correlates of workplace commitment across

cultures. We asked six organizational behavior scholars, who are intimately familiar with Brazil, China, Denmark,

Germany, or Israel as their country of origin or extended residence, to “contextualize”workplace commitment.

They did so by explicating institutional and cultural characteristics of their context on the emergence, meaning,

and evolution of commitment by reference to their own research and extant local research. Their responses not

only supported the utility of three-component model of commitment but also revealed the differential salience

of various commitment constructs (e.g., components and foci of commitment) as well as possible contextual

moderators on the development and outcomes of commitment. The commentators also described changes

including the growing prevalence of multicultural workforces within national borders and changes in employment

relationships and cultural values in their national contexts and considered future research directions in culture and

commitment research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: workplace commitment; commitment foci; culture

Commentary

Since the 1960s, commitment has become a popular, if not a staple, variable for organizational behavior (OB) scholars.

Originating in the USA (US; Becker, 1960; Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979) and further developed by Canadian as well

as American scholars (e.g., Becker, 1992; Klein, Molloy, & Brinsfield, 2012; Meyer & Allen, 1991; Meyer &

Herscovitch, 2001), models of workplace commitment have been widely adopted elsewhere (Fischer & Mansell, 2009;

Meyer et al., 2012). Indeed, this international spread of theory originating in North America (typically the USA) remain s

the most common trajectory organizational sciences (Peterson, 2001; Üsdiken & Wasti, 2009). When used outside their

country of origin, such constructs and theories are often implicitly or explicitly tested against a backdrop of varying

degrees of indigenous knowledge. In addition to confirming generalizable features of the original constructs and theories,

such global applications can uncover limitations so that a second generation of local research can develop contextually

*Correspondence to: S. Arzu Wasti, School of Management, Sabanci University, Orhanli, Tuzla, 34956, Istanbul, Turkey. E-mail: awasti@sabanciuniv.edu

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 15 March 2015

Revised 12 January 2016, Accepted 16 January 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 613–632 (2016)

Published online 11 February 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2094

Special Issue Article

sensitive alternatives or adaptations (Morris, Leung, Ames, & Lickel, 1999). This process has begun to occur for work-

place commitment (e.g., Ling, Zhang, & Fang, 2000; Wasti, 2003).

Our commentary, and indeed our title, echoes for the workplace commitment literature an earlier editorial of this journal

by Rousseau and Fried (2001) that exhorted scholars to explicitly incorporate context into their research questions, meth-

odology, and interpretation. The value of such a commentary became apparent during the 2014 Commitment Conference

that brought together scholars from 14 countries and generated a stimulating discussion on the construct, antecedents, and

consequences of workplace commitment around the globe. Incorporating context in cross-cultural organizational research

involves explaining the role of economic, cultural, and institutional differences or specifics for the emergence, meaning,

and evolution of phenomena, which in turn affect the measurement of concepts, mean levels of constructs, and relation-

ships among constructs (Gelfand, Leslie, & Fehr, 2008). Country differences in organizational commitment associated

with established culture dimensions are well documented in meta-analyses (Fischer & Mansell, 2009; Meyer et al., 2012).

Here, we have asked six OB scholars, who are intimately familiar with Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany, or Israel, to

contextualize workplace commitment based on their own work and/or a selective review of local research. Through this

endeavor, we hoped to progress beyond what has been achieved by meta-analyses to accomplish three goals: first, we

sought to discuss the cross-cultural construct validity of workplace commitment and identify specific contextual features

that may influence the meaning of commitment constructs. Constructs may be either conceptualized or operationalized dif-

ferently across cultures (Leung & van de Vijver, 2008). The commentators initially evaluated the suitability and sufficiency

of using the three-component model (TCM) by Meyer and Allen (1991) outside of North America. The TCM was selected

as the reference model because of its familiarity to the commentators and most JOB readers. Second, by asking the com-

mentators to appraise how the antecedents and consequences of commitment to various organizational foci would be best

conceptualized in their own context, we explored the contextual salience of various commitment constructs. Last, we

identified several future directions for cross-cultural commitment research based on the commentators’observations.

All commentators were participants in the 2014 Commitment Conference. Although this sampling strategy is no doubt

limiting, our commentators bring together a wide range of expertise in indigenous and/or cross-cultural commitment research

from a broad array of countries. BasedinGermany,HeikoBreitsohl’s earlier work focused on commitment of students to-

wards their university and dual commitments of temporary workers; he is currently exploring residual affective commitment

as a basis for the recruitment of former interns and employees. Aaron Cohen’s primary research interest is the relationships

among multiple foci of commitment and their implications in the workplace. His quantitative studies are based on surveying

different ethnic groups in Israel, mainly Israeli Arabs and Jews. Frances Jørgensen is a qualitative researcher in human re-

source management and development. As an American who has lived in Denmark since 1998 and who speaks fluent Danish,

Jørgensen has extensively used action research methods in Danish public and private organizations. Ana Carolina de Aguiar

Rodrigues’research interests include organizational commitment and entrenchment in the Brazilian context. In her survey

and interview-based studies, she explores these constructs across samples ranging from rural t o urban, high to low education,

and public to private sector. Qingxiong (Derek) Weng does quantitative research in different regions of China about the im-

plications of career growth for organizational and occupational commitment. Xiaohong Xu is originally from China and now

resides in the USA. She has conducted both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies using person-centered and variable-

centered approaches and has examined antecedents and outcomes of organizational commitment with samples of US army

officers and faculty. She has also conducted meta-analysis studies using samples from different occupations and countries.

Readers may notice some imbalance in the coverage each country received. This does not reflect the importance of any

particular context, but usually occurs because we had two contributors from China, and only one from the other countries.

Also, more space was allocated to reporting research available in non-English outlets.

TCM across Contexts

Of the various frameworks for conceptualizing commitment, the TCM by Meyer and Allen (1991) has become the

dominant paradigm (for a critical review, see Klein et al., 2012). In this model, commitment is a force that binds an

614 S. A. WASTI ET AL.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 613–632 (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/job