Organizational Behaviour Comportement Organisationnel

Morrison, 1994). Future research that explores the moderating role of commitment onpsychological contract violations is needed, as is work that examines the causal links betweenaffective/normative commitment and psychological contracts.It was expected that respondents with high levels of continuance commitment (i.e., whenindividual-organizational attachment is grounded in cost-benefit analysis and the perceivedavailability of alternative employment options) would be more likely to hold shorter-term,narrowly-focused transactional obligations, and less likely to have relational obligations thanwould respondents who reported low levels of continuance commitment. Instead, we found thatcontinuance commitment correlated positively with elements of transactional and relationalcontracts. We found that respondents reporting high levels of continuance commitment held anarrow view of the job in terms of performance obligations (e.g., only perform duties for which Iam compensated; one perform specific duties I agreed to do when hired), but valued a longertermemployment relationship (e.g., no plans to look for a job elsewhere; feel an obligation toremain with this department indefinitely). This finding may help explain why employees whoreport high levels of continuance commitment, on average, are rated as less productive than thoseemployees who have low levels of continuance commitment or when the level of affectivecommitment is high (see Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001; Meyer et al., 2002). Organizations whoattempt to lock in their employees through non-portable pension plans, generous compensationpackages, or provide extensive training in organization-specific skills may, in fact, be fosteringcontinuance commitment and unintentionally encouraging the development of transactionalobligations. Future work is needed to examine further the links between continuancecommitment and perceived obligations, and the conditions that strengthen these relations.As with prior work showing links between turnover intention and both organizationalcommitment (e.g., Tett & Meyer, 1993) and psychological contract (e.g., Turnley & Feldman,1999), our findings explicitly link perceptions of individual-organizational attachment to microlevelmotivational process variables across several criterion domains. When the criterion is taskperformance, perceived norms have been shown to impact other cognitive mechanisms such asself-efficacy strength, performance valence, and personal goals or behavioral intentions (seeLocke & Latham, 1990). Moreover, when the criterion is absenteeism, perceived norms havebeen linked clearly to attendance motivation and absence culture (Johns, 1997). Establishing thatthe cognitive-motivational processes that mediate goal-setting activities are influenced byattitudinal dispositions opens up new research directions. We need to also think carefully aboutthe causal relationship between work attitudes and the social context. It is also quite plausiblethat the nature of our respondents’ commitment to their organization and their interpretation oftheir employment relationship via the psychological contract, including perceptions of fair socialexchange, is shaped by social information in the work environment (for a discussion of socialinformation processing theory and the implications of this model for work attitudes, see Salancikand Pfeffer, 1978). More work is clearly needed!One of the limitations of this study is the fact that all measures were self-report, raisingconcerns the relationships we observed resulted from common method variance. Lindell and hiscolleagues (Lindell & Brandt, 2000; Lindell & Whitney, 2001) have argued that researchers maybe able to assess the extent to which common method variance is a problem by including at leastone scale that is theoretically unrelated to at least one other scale in the questionnaire, so that onemay have a priori justification for predicting a zero correlation. A recent meta-analysis (Meyer etal., 2002) of the three-component model of organizational commitment suggests that thecorrelation between affective and continuance commitment across a large number of studies150