Testing the "Side-Bet Theory" of Organizational Commitment: Some Methodological Considerations

According to the side-bet theory of organizational commitment, commitment (referred to here as continuance commitment) increases with the accumulation of side bets or investments. Two studies were conducted to demonstrate that both the instruments used to measure commitment (viz , Ritzer-Tnce, R-T, and HrebimakAlutto, H-A, scales) and the side-bet indexes (viz., age and tenure) used in previous tests of this theory are inappropriate for that purpose In Study 1 subjects read scenarios in which an employee was described as being high or low in continuance commitment and high or low m affective commitment (i.e., emotional attachment) and responded to several commitment instruments as they felt the employee would respond. As expected, the continuance commitment manipulation accounted for a relatively small portion of the variance in the R-T and H-A scale scores, whereas the affective commitment manipulation accounted for a substantially larger portion The continuance manipulation did, however, account for large a portion of the variance in scores on an author-developed continuance commitment scale (CCS). In Study 2, 130 employees from several administrative departments of a large university completed the same commitment instruments. As predicted, the R-T and H-A scales correlated significantly with measures of affective commitment but not with the CCS. Also as predicted, age and tenure correlated with the R-T and H-A scales and with the affective commitment measures but not with the CCS. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for future investigation of the side-bet theory.

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