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Chapter 3
Measuring Organizational
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Commitment
Among several research tools, two instruments are at the core of empirical
research on organizational commitment (OC). One is the Organizational
Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) that was developed by Mowday et al.
(1979). The second tool is the three-dimensional OC, developed by Allen
and Meyer (1990).
A 15-item OCQ was developed by Porter et al. (1974) and codified by
Mowday et al. (1979). They interviewed 2,563 employees in nine widely
diverse work organizations over a nine-year period. Job classifications of
those interviewed included public employees, classified university
employees, hospital personnel, bank and telephone company employees,
scientists and engineers, auto company managers, psychiatric technicians
and retail management trainees. Cook and Wall interviewed 650 United
Kingdom blue-collar workers in two separate studies. The samples were
composed of full-time skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled male workers in
manufacturing industries.
Cook and Wall (1980) developed a shorter nine-item version scale,
adapted from the longer OCQ, designed for a working-class population. It
was supposed to capture three of the following interrelated dimensions:
(a) acceptance of the organization’s values (identification), (b) willingness
to exert effort on behalf of the organization (involvement) and (c) a desire
to remain an employee of the organization (loyalty).

13

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14 Organizational Commitment: The Case of Unrewarded Behavior

The following items make up the Cook and Wall’s questionnaire of

OC. Responses are on a seven-point range (R is for reversal items) as
given in the following:
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1. I am quite proud to be able to tell people who it is I work for.

2. I sometimes feel like leaving this employment for good (R).
3. I am not willing to put myself out just to help the organization (R).
4. Even if the firm were not doing too well financially, I would be reluc-
tant to change to another employer.
5. I feel myself to be part of the organization.
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6. In my work I like to feel I am making some effort, not just for myself
but for the organization as well.
7. The offer of a bit more money with another employer would not seri-
ously make me think of changing my job.
8. I would not recommend a close friend to join our staff (R).
9. To know that my own work had made a contribution to the good of
the organization would please me.

Cook and Wall reported convergent reliability (Cronbach’s a) of 0.87

and 0.80 for their two samples. However, Mowday et al. and Cook and
Wall failed to validate the theoretically three-derived dimensions. Mowday
et al.’s factor analysis of the 15-item OCQ revealed only a single factor
solution. Also, Price and Mueller (1986, p. 77) reported that there is no
empirical support for claiming that the items of the Cook and Wall scale
differentiate three distinct dimensions of commitment. Morrow (1983),
using facet design to compare and contrast related concepts, disclosed a
redundancy among different foci of commitment. She showed, for exam-
ple, that the identification component of the Mowday–Cook–Wall scales
subsumes measures of job involvement. Price and Mueller (1986, p. 81)
also noted an ambiguity between Mowday et al.’s distinction between
commitment and satisfaction.
Angle and Perry (1981) found similar results. A factor analysis of the
15-item Porter OCQ revealed almost identical characteristics between
two dimensions or subscales: a value commitment, comprising items of iden-
tification and involvement, and items indicating a commitment to retain

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Measuring Organizational Commitment 15

membership in the organization. Bar-Haim and Berman (1992) researched the

dimensionality of OC scale of Cook and Wall among 1,299 employees in 14
major Israeli industrial enterprises, representing a wide range of products
produced, technology, size of organization and type of community where the
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organizations were located, over a three-year period (1984 to 1986). Using a

factor analysis, the nine items of Cook and Wall’s scale yielded two different
measures of OC: identification on the first factor and loyalty on the second
factor. They interpreted this as a distinction between passive and active OC,
hidden in the original scales, that could prove useful in understanding the
behavior of different populations of industrial workers.
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Nowadays, the most accepted tool to measure OC is that of Alan

and Meyer (1990). This questionnaire is composed, in its full length, of
24 items, eight items in each of the following claimed dimension: affec-
tive commitment scale (ACS), continuance commitment scale (CCS) and
normative commitment scale (NCS). It also has a shortened version with
six items per dimension:

· Affective Commitment Scale Items:

1. I would be very happy to spend the rest of my career in this
organization.
2. I really feel as if this organization’s problems are my own.
3. I do not feel like “part of my family” at this organization (R).
4. I do not feel “emotionally attached” to this organization (R).
5. This organization has a great deal of personal meaning for me.
6. I do not feel a strong sense of belonging to this organization (R).
· Continuance Commitment Scale Items:
7. It would be very hard for me to leave my job at this organization
right now even if I wanted to.
8. Too much of my life would be disrupted if I leave my organization.
9. Right now, staying with my job at this organization is a matter of
necessity as much as desire.
10. I believe I have too few options to consider leaving this organization.
11. One of the few negative consequences of leaving my job at this organi-
zation would be the scarcity of available alternatives elsewhere.

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16 Organizational Commitment: The Case of Unrewarded Behavior

12. One of the major reasons I continue to work for this organization
is that leaving would require considerable personal sacrifice.
· Normative Commitment Scale Items:
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13. I do not feel any obligation to remain with my organization (R).

14. Even if it were to my advantage, I do not feel it would be right to
leave.
15. I would feel guilty if I left this organization now.
16. This organization deserves my loyalty.
17. I would not leave my organization right now because of my sense
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of obligation to it.
18. I owe a great deal to this organization.

Since the intensive preoccupation with the methodology of OC

research in the nineties, the three-dimensional questionnaire of Allen and
Meyer has become canonical. Today, validation of this questionnaire is
not frequent and is performed mainly to check for cultural biases. Such is
the study of Abdullah (2011) in the Pakistani context (found reliable), or
of Karim and Noor (2006) in the Malaysian context (found reliable, but
only ACS and CCS were examined, and among Malaysian academic
librarians).

The Values’ Base of OC as a Methodological Problem

We saw that social values’ base of OC is a consistent element in almost
any theory of OC. Why is this so? The place of values in organizational
behavior stems from several theoretical points of view. One of the most
accepted frameworks is the concept of congruence between characteristics
of the individual and characteristics of the organization as a predictor of
organizational attitudes and behavior (Chatman, 1989; Edwards, 1994).
Kristof (1996) defined such a person–organization fit as “the compatibil-
ity between people and organizations that occurs when: (a) at least one
entity provides what the other needs, or (b) they share similar fundamental
characteristics, or (c) both” (p. 5).
Values are characteristics that both employees and organizations
may share. One can easily show that employees would be more

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Measuring Organizational Commitment 17

comfortable in a workplace that is consistent with their values. Imagine

an individual who values “honesty”, who is working in an organization
that emphasizes “getting the job done at all costs”. In all likelihood, the
result of placing people in situations at odds with their personal values
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will not be positive for either the employees or the organization. Not
only could employees’ well-being be at risk, but it is also possible that
they would be less devoted to the organization and possibly less
productive.
Rokeach (1973, p. 5) in a seminal work defined a value as “an
enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of exist-
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ence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse

mode of control”. In a similar way, Dose (1997, pp. 227–228) defines
values as “evaluative standards relating to work or the work environ-
ment by which individuals discern what is “right” or assess the impor-
tance of preferences”. McDonald and Gandz (1991), Seligman and
Katz (1996), Meyer et al. (1993) and others modified Rokeach’s origi-
nal list for use in the organizational context.1 Finegan (2000) applied
the 24-item questionnaire of McDonald (1993) in her study, and
showed its consistency with the value dimensions distinguished by
Schwartz and Bilsky (1987).
In this book, the value dimension in the context of OC is approached
in a different way. Since the focus of this study is OC, and since one of
the major bases of commitment is norms and values, I need to control
for the general propensity of employees to adhere to any set of values
when they refer to the normative dimension OC. Thus, the dimensionality
or factor structure of a set of values is less relevant here, and only the
overall score of the importance of any set of values is counted.2

1
Rokeach’s scale is based on rank-order values, which results in statistical problems
(Edwards, 1994). In the McDonald and Gandz’s revised version, the values are rated rather
than rank-ordered.
2
However, I could not avoid the curiosity about the factor structure of the values set in my
study (see later). Therefore, I applied the same factor analysis as Finegan did and more
(I explored three, four and the maximum five factor solutions that I had in my data), and
I also applied a non-metric Guttman–Lingoes smallest space analysis (SSA), but failed to
reconstruct her four-factor structure of values.

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18 Organizational Commitment: The Case of Unrewarded Behavior

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) as a Measure

of Commitment
A note should be added at this point about a related concept and measure
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of commitment, namely, OCB. In a study on OCB, Schappe (1998) found

that only OC predicts OCB (the other unsupported predictors were job
satisfaction and fairness perceptions, and all the three variables were
related to OCB in a meta-analysis on 55 studies by Organ and Ryan
(1995)).
Numerous studies define OCB as a category of extra-role behavior, or
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in Organ’s (1988, p. 4) words: “individual behavior that is discretionary,

not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that
in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization”.
No doubt, OC is an extra-role behavior as well. However, at the moment,
OCB scales suffer from similar problems of the old OC scales. For exam-
ple, Williams and Anderson (1991) argue that there is a conceptual over-
lap between job satisfaction and OC, and the significant relationships that
have been found using only job satisfaction or OC to predict OCB are
potentially spurious.3 It also lacks the unique property of OC as a pure
behavior of choice when the organization is at crossroads.
In a rare study on the relationships among OC, job satisfaction, proce-
dural justice and OCB, Schappe (1998) showed that, contrary to findings
from previous research, when considering job satisfaction, procedural
justice perceptions and OC as predictors, only OC emerged as a significant
predictor of OCB.
Weiner (1972), Scholl (1981) and Kanter (1972) have already dis-
cussed this. Scholl suggested that because commitment maintains behav-
ioral direction when there is little expectation of formal organizational
rewards for performance, it is a likely determinant of OCB. Weiner sug-
gested that commitment is responsible for behaviors that do not depend
primarily on reinforcements or punishment. Rosabeth Kanter, in her

3
The often-cited five dimensions of OCB, namely, altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy,
sportsmanship and civic virtue, are rarely fully used in concrete research works or in
standard forms. So, there is a significant gap between this extra-role category and its
measurement.

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Measuring Organizational Commitment 19

seminal work, conceptualized commitment as a central concern of the

American communes in the 19th century, precisely because it was so dif-
ficult for the members to comply with their demanding way of life.
Therefore, OCB is a litmus test for OC. As Schappe said, following
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Organ (1988), OCBs are not mandated by job descriptions, they are rarely
linked directly to the job or, more specifically, to job performance.
OCB exists outside of the domain of traditional behavior that “gets the
job done”, yet citizenship behavior is still an important element of an
employee’s overall contribution to an organization. This remark is appro-
priate for OC as well. Employees may engage in behaviors that are benefi-
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cial to co-workers, superiors or the organization as a whole. Thus, the

managers’ ability to motivate employees by relying on formal reward
structures to reinforce specific role requirements is limited.
The weakness of the assertion that OC is a part of reward system in
the workplace is evident in some studies. For example, Boroff and Lewin
(1997) developed a model of employee voice and employee intent to exit
the firm. They found that loyal employees who experienced unfair work-
place treatment primarily responded by suffering in silence.

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