When normative commitment leads to lower well-being and reduced performance

Abstract

Normative commitment, or employees’ loyalty to their organization based on a sense of obligation, has received less attention than affective and continuance commitment. Building on recent work suggesting that normative commitment’s meaning is influenced by the within-person context provided by the other components of commitment, we theorized that normative commitment would be experienced as externally driven, hence detrimental to well-being and performance, when few alternatives commitment, a sub-component of continuance commitment, is high. Based on two independent samples ( Ns = 366 and 100), Study 1 found normative commitment to be more positively related to emotional exhaustion and psychological distress at high levels of few alternatives commitment. Study 2 ( N = 187) found normative commitment to be less positively related to job performance when few alternatives commitment was high. Implications of these findings for our understanding of normative commitment’s workings are highlighted.

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