Organizational Behaviour Comportement Organisationnel

The third component in the commitment model, normative commitment, is based on anemployee’s feeling of personal obligation to stay with an organization or to remain committed toa course of action (Meyer & Allen, 1997; Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001). Despite factor analyticresearch that has supported the distinctiveness of affective and normative commitment (e.g.,Allen & Meyer, 1996), correlations between these components tend to be high. In addition,affective commitment and normative commitment share the same pattern of correlations with anumber of key outcome variables, although these correlations tend to be stronger for affectivecommitment (Meyer at al., 2002). Meyer and Allen (1997) have speculated that the parallelfindings often found in research with affective and normative commitment may indicate that“some types of positive experiences influence feelings of emotional attachment and feelings ofobligation at the same time” (p. 63). Perhaps for these reasons, the majority of commitmentresearch examining the three-component model has focused on affective and continuancecommitment.Because of the implied exchange of obligations, normative commitment is viewed asbeing most closely linked to psychological contracts. Meyer and colleagues (Meyer & Allen,1997; Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001), for example, speculated that it was this notion of obligationsthat made normative commitment relevant to psychological contracts, particularly perceivedrelational obligations. Recent research by Irving and Bobocel (2001) found that relationalobligations accounted for a significant amount of variance in normative commitment, even aftercontrolling for affective commitment. These findings suggest that relational obligations may bean important predictor in the development of normative commitment. However, before we canconclude that this is the case, it is important to establish whether measures of relationalobligations are empirically distinct or indistinct from measures of normative commitment.Hypothesis 3: Measures of normative commitment and relational obligations will beempirically indistinctAssessing Relations to Motivational Process VariablesAnother way of assessing the degree of similarity or overlap between the threecomponents of organizational commitment and employee’s perceived obligations was to assesstheir relations to other concepts within the broader nomological network. Of particular interesthere is to observe how the attachment concepts relate, if at all, to several motivational processvariables with known links to actual on-the-job behaviors such as absenteeism, job performance,and turnover. The rationale and description of a general process model now follows.Organizational researchers are interested in studying organizational commitment and thecomponent of psychological contracts reflecting employees’ perceived obligations because eachis believed to play a role in determining work behaviors, such as attendance, job performance,citizenship behavior/contextual performance, and turnover. Although many empirical studiesreport bivariate correlations between one or more components of commitment and a variety ofdifferent behavioral outcomes (for reviews, see Meyer & Allen, 1997; Meyer et al., 2002), verylittle research attention has been focused on explaining how an attitudinal disposition, likeorganizational commitment, affects behavior. The same is true for perceived obligations. Whilethere is growing empirical evidence that measures of psychological contract correlate with workoutcomes such as citizenship behavior (e.g., Robinson & Morrison, 1995), turnover (e.g., Turnley& Feldman, 1999) and job performance (see Irving & Gellatly, 2001), few studies have examinedhow perceived obligations impact behavior. It is much more common to discuss the behavioral142