Assessing Organizational Commitment: An Employee's Global Attitude toward the Organization

In response to numerous calls for a clarification of conceptual and methodological issues related to organizational commitment, the authors propose using advances in the conceptualization of attitudes. In applying this approach, we asked employees to complete semantic differential scales measuring organizational commitment as a global attitude toward the organization and to complete the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ). With a sample of 258 employees from three organizations, it was found that the attitudinal measure correlated strongly with the OCQ (r > .82). Measures of effort, value acceptance, and intentions to stay with the organization predicted little additional variance in the OCQ. The data support the proposal that organizational commitment as generally assessed may best be defined as a global attitude that employees have toward their organization. The authors discuss how treating organizational commitment as an attitude helps to clarify the meaning of the construct, suggests a more direct method of measurement, and encourages new research examining the causes and consequences of organizational commitment.

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