Commitment and Insurance Agents' Job Perceptions, Attitudes, and Performance

Introduction "Work commitment" describes a number of concepts relating to employee attachment to work related entities. Morrow (1983) has identified five such entities or facets of work commitment: commitment to one's organization, job, career or profession, union, and work values. While these forms of work commitment have received the most attention, other commitments such as those to a community have also been proposed and investigated (Steffy and Jones, 1988). It has been suggested that, since salespeople (e.g., insurance agents) clearly have multiple loyalties, multiple forms of work commitment should be considered within single investigations (e.g., Chonko, 1986; Johnston et al., 1990). Considerable attention has been paid over the years to the qualities of the measures used to tap commitment concepts (e.g., Koslowsky, Caspy, and Lazar, 1990; Mathieu and Farr, 1991), to identifying the antecedents and consequences of these concepts (e.g., Colarelli and Bishop, 1990; Mathieu and Zajac, 1990), and recently to how these forms of work commitment might interact to influence attitudes and performance behaviors. It is the last of these topics that constitutes the focus of this article. Blau and Boal (1987) were among the first to hypothesize how various forms of work commitment might interact to affect work related attitudes and behaviors. Their model crosses high and low levels of organizational commitment with high and low levels of job involvement, producing four types of employees. Their model predicts that job attitudes such as job satisfaction and behaviors such as turnover and absenteeism can be better understood by examining the interaction between organizational commitment and job involvement than by examining either form of work commitment separately. Positioning commitment variables as antecedents is also more consistent with the view that commitment is a processual phenomenon, affecting work related perceptions and outcomes, and not just a consequence of perceptions and attitudes (Johnston et al., 1990; Mowday, Porter, and Steers, 1982; Pinder, 1984; Wiener and Vardi, 1980). Vandenberg and Lance (1992), for example, used a structural equation model to demonstrate that organizational commitment caused satisfaction rather than satisfaction causing commitment. It is also consistent with the social information processing approach (Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978; Staw, 1986), which contends that perceptions and attitudes are highly variable and relatively unstable judgments that are easily influenced by such factors as preexisting attitudes (e.g., levels of commitment). Accordingly, this study examines the effects of commitment, separately and interactively, on the attitudes and behaviors of insurance agents. Agent work commitment is an important issue to the insurance industry because of the difficulty and costs associated with attracting and retaining productive agents and because of the direct impact agents have on the insurer's financial success. Job turnover among agents at independent agencies has been shown to be relatively low, but the loss of an experienced agent can be catastrophic (CPCU Journal, 1991). In the life insurance industry, on the other hand, agent retention from 1988-1990 averaged 19 percent (King, 1992). Life insurance companies are currently emphasizing the allocation of resources for agent training and seasoning, focusing on retention rather than on new producer recruitment (King, 1992). Research on agent work commitment should prove useful to such retention efforts. Because of the nature of the insurance industry, a direct replication of Blau and Boal's model using insurance agents is not appropriate, particularly because not all forms of work commitment are equally germane to the insurance industry. Union commitment, for example, is not applicable to the insurance agent domain. Organizational commitment also has less applicability to insurance agents than to other employee populations, because many insurance agents--particularly independent agents--sell numerous types of policies from several companies; thus, it is less logical to think of an agent's psychological attachment and desire to remain with a particular company. …

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