The Moderating Effects of Employee Tenure on the Relation Between Organizational Commitment and Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis investigated the correlation between attitudinal commitment and job performance for 3,630 employees obtained from 27 independent studies across various levels of employee tenure. Controlling for employee age and other nuisance variables, the authors found that tenure had a very strong nonlinear moderating effect on the commitment-performance correlation, with correlations tending to decrease exponentially with increasing tenure. These findings do not appear to be the result of differences across studies in terms of the type of performance measure (supervisory vs. self), type of tenure (job vs. organizational), or commitment measure (Organizational Commitment Questionnaire [L. W. Porter, R. M. Steers, R. T. Mowday, & P. V. Boulian, 1974] vs. other). The implications and future research directions of these results are discussed.

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