Managing for Commitment
As we noted in Chapter 4, perceptions play an important role in the development of employees' commitment to the organization. For example, employees who believe that their organizations are supportive tend to become affectively committed. Those who recognize that they have made substantial investments that would be lost if they were to leave the company develop continuance commitment. Those who think that “loyalty” is expected of them become normatively committed. It follows then, that to “manage” commitment, organizations must influence employees' perceptions.
The amount of empirical research conducted to examine the impact of management practices on commitment is limited. We focus our attention here on two areas of management research where commitment has been examined as an outcome variable: human resource ...