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This study examined the structural properties of two organizational commitment measures, the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ; Mowday, Porter, & Steers, 1982) and Organizational Commitment Scales (OCS; Meyer & Allen, 1991) that included Affective Commitment Scale (ACS), Normative Commitment Scale (NCS), and Continuance Commitment Scale (CCS). The results provided evidence for the reliability and uni-dimensionality of OCQ. Results of Exploratory as well as Confirmatory Factor Analysis (comparing four competing models) revealed that the OCQ converged with ACS, diverged from CCS, which was relatively independent of the ACS and NCS, but had a positive relationship with NCS.
Keywords: organizational commitment, factor analysis, pathway analysis, assessment
Tremendous research effort has been devoted to understand the nature, dimensions, and antecedents of organizational commitment during the last three decades spawning hundreds of articles, tomes, and books in the academic and practitioner literature as well as the popular press. However, most of these studies have been conducted in North-American and western contexts. In fact, the study of this construct did not enter its international phase until 1990s. Randall (1993) listed among the papers in English, twenty-three studies conducted outside the U.S. and remarked that twelve of them concerned field of investigation located in Canada. A systematic investigation of the meaning and antecedents of organizational commitment across culture is indeed essential to assess the generalizability of the unique findings. In fact, a clear understanding of organizational commitment construct has been hampered by some ambiguity in the definition and measurement of the construct itself. Morrow (1983) noted over twenty-five commitment related concepts. The variety of perspectives regarding the most appropriate definition of organizational commitment has led to some disagreement about how the construct should be measured. An assortment of scales exists that have been designed to measure organizational commitment (e.g., Balfour & Wechsler, 1996; Cook & Wall, 1980; Meyer & Allen, 1991; Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979; O'Reilly & Chatman, 1986).
The limited research that compared and contrasted the available measures (see, for example, Becker, 1992; Charles-Pauvers & Caroline, 2004; Cohen, 1996; Kackmar, Carlson, & Brymer, 1999; Magazine, Williams, & Williams, 1996; Mathews & Shepherd, 2002; Vandenberg, Self, & Seo, 1994) noted a great deal of overlap in the items that constituted these scales. Infact, Vandenberg et al. (1994) noted that...