Organisational Commitment (OC) has been conceptualised and operationalised in
a number of different ways: Mathieu and Zajac (1990: 171-172) note that many
researchers follow the model developed by Porter, Mowday, Steers and colleagues
(e.g. Porter et al. 1974; Mowday et al. 1979) which features the three domains
of:
Affective Commitment – AC, which describes an individual’s emotional
attachment to their organisation;
Normative Commitment – NC, which describes the individual’s perceived
obligation to continue with their occupation / organisation; and
Continuance Commitment – CC, which relates to an individual’s assessment of
the relative costs and benefits of staying with or leaving their job/organisation.
Carbery et al. describe these domains neatly:
Employees with strong affective commitment remain because they
want to, those with strong continuance commitment because they
need to, and those with strong normative commitment because they
feel they ought to do so.
(Carbery et al. 2003: 657)
Of these three domains, Affective Commitment is of the greatest interest for this
research as, of the three OC domains, it is this one that is the most amenable to
being positively influenced by leader behaviour. Writing before the term Affective
Commitment was coined, Buchanan (1974) describes this type of commitment as
a:
...partisan, affective attachment to the goals and values of one’s role
in relation to the goals and values, and to the organisation for its own
sake, apart from its purely instrumental worth
(Buchanan 1974: 533)Within Buchanan’s definition it is possible to see the linkages with the
Inspirational Motivation domain of transformational leadership wherein the
valorisation of vision and goals is central. In contrast, Normative Commitment
describes, in transactional leadership parlance, an obligational or ‘contractual’
commitment, while Continuance Commitment is based on an employee’s rational
assessment based on a range of job-related costs and benefits.
The most popularly-applied measure of OC in the hospitality literature has been
the 24-item scale developed by Meyer and Allen (Meyer and Allen 1984; Allen and