The differing impact of commitment profiles on Turnover intentions and Discretionary effort

Organisational commitment is extensively represented in the human resource management and organisational behaviour literature as a key factor in the relationship between employees and their respective organisations. Researchers such as Allen & Meyer, (1990), Meyer, Allen & Smith, (1993) Wasti, (2005) and Whitener (2001) have argued that organisational commitment impacts on business performance and employee retention. Effectively managing employee commitment to the organisation has thus become an important task for organisational sustainability (Whitener 2001). Managing this task has led to various models of organisational commitment. Allen and Meyer (1990) constructed a three component model with affective, continuance and normative categories of organisational commitment. Although Allen and Meyer refer to the notion that an employee can experience the three components of organisational commitment simultaneously, the majority of previous studies have looked at the antecedents and outcomes of each component independently. The purpose of this study was to examine how the components combine to create commitment profiles and the implications of different profiles for job outcomes, specifically employees‟ turnover intention and discretionary effort. Commitment profiles were investigated using Allen and Meyer‟ (1990) model of organisational commitment. Commitment profiles were generated using k-mean cluster analysis. Results of cluster analysis showed that there were four distinct commitment profiles. These were labelled as highly committed (i.e., high affective and continuance commitment), non-committed (i.e., low levels of affective and low continuance commitment), affective dominant (i.e., high affective and low continuance commitment) and continuance dominant (i.e., high continuance and low affective commitment). The results of the analysis of variance found that the highly–committed and affective dominant profiles were the most desirable with lower turnover intentions and higher levels of self-reported discretionary effort in comparison with the non-committed and continuance dominant profiles (less turnover intention and high discretionary effort). Unexpectedly, the non-committed profile was associated with comparatively high levels of discretionary effort. The implications of these results for commitment research and practice were discussed.