This paper compares and contrasts three influential academic studies on organizational commitment: Swailes (2002), Riketta (2008), and Harrison et al. (2006). The analysis examines each study's key arguments, methodological approaches, and conclusions regarding the relationship between job attitudes, organizational commitment, and job performance. While all three studies acknowledge the difficulty of establishing strong causal links between organizational commitment and measurable outcomes, they collectively affirm that such links exist. The paper highlights points of convergence—particularly around the complexity of measuring attitudinal predictors—and notes how the latter two studies address acknowledged shortcomings in Swailes's foundational work.
This paper compares and contrasts three articles relating to organizational commitment. All three are significant contributions to the topic drawn from academic and peer-reviewed scholarly sources. The first is the 2002 treatise by Swailes, which serves as the primary framework for this analysis. It is compared against the 2008 work of Riketta and the 2006 work of Harrison et al. While there are definite differences in the approaches and conclusions of the three studies, they also share strong common threads.
Swailes began by tracing early viewpoints on organizational commitment, dating back to the work of Fayol in the 1940s. He also examined Weber's work from 1947 and surveyed other contributions through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. A key early work that Swailes identified as pivotal was Etzioni's (1961) identification of the "four bases" of organizational commitment. Etzioni outlined three primary means of involvement — moral, calculative, and alienative — with the alienative form being applicable only to settings such as prisons and the military, and therefore having no place in a normal business environment. He further noted that these three kinds of involvement can be linked to three kinds of power: coercive, remunerative, and normative.
After covering several other frameworks, Swailes reached a major conclusion: there is not a strong, clearly established linkage between organizational commitment and measurable outcomes. He argued, however, that this gap exists because researchers tend to examine the reasons behind commitment rather than commitment itself. He also noted that the perceived outcomes and their antecedents are highly complex and varied, making definitive linkages difficult to establish. Furthermore, he observed that contributing factors tend to "coalesce" into feelings and perceptions rather than discrete, impersonal variables. In short, the feelings and perceptions of individuals are inextricably tied to the outcomes being tracked and measured.
Riketta's findings were somewhat definitive but only modestly so. As noted in the results section, there is a positive link between job satisfaction and organizational commitment — but while statistically significant, this relationship is characterized as only "weakly" positive. The study quickly acknowledged that the linkages between job attitudes and resulting effects on performance are not easy to observe or prove. The final portion of the results also accounted for a lag between the time efforts are applied and any changes in organizational commitment outcomes, if such changes occur at all. The discussion summarized that the meta-analytic analysis reveals a link — but a weak one — between job attitudes and job performance.
Harrison et al. began by carefully defining the terms and outcomes under analysis. Their predictors included job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and overall job attitude. Their criteria referred to focal versus contextual performance, with contextual performance measured against metrics such as absenteeism, lateness, turnover, and focal performance. Additional criteria included general withdrawal behaviors — patterns in which an employee begins to disengage from organizational performance and commitment rather than embrace it. The study employed the compatibility principle, as advanced by Fisher (1980) and Hulin (1991), which holds that the "meager" connections between job attitudes and job performance are strongly attributable to general social psychology principles. The authors further argued that establishing strong linkages — of the kind attempted by the other authors discussed in this paper — is difficult because job attitudes do not predict job behavior well due to operating at a different "level of abstraction" than attitudinal predictors.
"Comparative analysis of causal links across studies"
"Why coercive management fails outside controlled settings"
It is clear that certain organizational practices have a positive effect on organizational commitment while others have a negative effect. Regardless, a time lag exists between the implementation of practices and observable outcomes, and establishing causal relationships can be quite difficult. To dismiss the linkage on those grounds alone, however, would be a mistake. There is little disagreement in the scholarly literature that best practices produce positive results and poor practices produce negative ones. What will be essential in future research is identifying which practices work most effectively and most quickly, as opposed to those with delayed effects or limited long-term impact.
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