ABSTRACT
Prior research has shown that procedural fairness interacts with outcome fairness to influence employees' work attitudes (e.g., organizational commitment) and behaviors (e.g., job performance, organizational citizenship behavior), such that employees' tendencies to respond more positively to higher procedural fairness are stronger when outcome fairness is relatively low. In the present studies, we posited that people's uncertainty about their standing as organizational members would have a moderating influence on this interactive relationship between procedural fairness and outcome fairness, in that the interactive relationship was expected to be more pronounced when uncertainty was high. Using different operationalizations of uncertainty of standing (i.e., length of tenure as a proxy, along with self-reports and coworkers' reports), we found support for this hypothesis in 4 field studies spanning 3 different countries.
Subject(s)
Attitude , Cooperative Behavior , Job Satisfaction , Organizational Culture , Personnel Loyalty , Social Justice , Uncertainty , Adult , Decision Making, Organizational , Female , Humans , Male , Motivation , Netherlands , Organizational Objectives , Personnel Management , RewardABSTRACT
This article offers a conceptual critique of the three-component model (TCM) of organizational commitment (Allen & Meyer, 1990) and proposes a reconceptualization based on standard attitude theory. The authors use the attitude-behavior model by Eagly and Chaiken (1993) to demonstrate that the TCM combines fundamentally different attitudinal phenomena. They argue that general organizational commitment can best be understood as an attitude regarding the organization, while normative and continuance commitment are attitudes regarding specific forms of behavior (i.e., staying or leaving). The conceptual analysis shows that the TCM fails to qualify as general model of organizational commitment but instead represents a specific model for predicting turnover. The authors suggest that the use of the TCM be restricted to this purpose and that Eagly and Chaiken's model be adopted as a generic commitment model template from which a range of models for predicting specific organizational behaviors can be extracted. Finally, they discuss the definition and measurement of the organizational commitment attitude. Covering the affective, cognitive, and behavioral facets of this attitude helps to enhance construct validity and to differentiate the construct from other constructs.
