Survey Results of the New Health Care Worker Study: Implications ...

48commitment scale is a measure of attitudinal commitment focusing on the process by whichpeople come to think about their relationships with the organization (Meyer & Allen 1997).Strong commitment, i.e. strong positive attitude towards the employing organization, is highlyassociated with the desirable organizational outcomes of lower absenteeism and turnover.Commitment is often referred in workplaces as allegiance, loyalty or attachment. Theorganizational commitment scale of Meyer, Allen & Smith consists of three components:affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment.Affectivecommitment refers to the nurse's emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvementin the hospital. A strong affective commitment shows an emotional commitment to the hospital.Continuance commitment refers to the nurse's awareness of the costs that might be associatedwith leaving the hospital. They are committed to the hospital because they believe that they haveno other employment options. Lastly, normative commitment shows the feeling of obligation tothe hospital to continue employment. High normative commitment scores show the nurses’attitudes that they feel obligated to stay with the hospital and continue to provide care to patients.Each component of the scale consist of 6 items, scored on a 5-point scale with 1=strongly disagree to 5= strongly agree. The scale range is between 6 and 30 for each componentwith higher scores indicating higher organizational commitment. As presented in Table 28, theaverage for affective commitment was 17.7 (SD = 4.5), and Cronbach’s alpha = .82; forcontinuance commitment the mean was 17.9 (SD = 4.1) with Cronbach’s alpha= .72, and fornormative commitment the mean was 15.7 (SD = 4.4) and Cronbach’s alpha = .83. All threealphas were sufficiently high indicating a good internal reliability of the three components of theorganizational commitment scale.