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ACTIVATION AS A MODERATOR IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND PERFORMANCE
Abstract
Organizational commitment is examined from three different theoretical perspectives: sociological, psychological, and organizational behavior. Research from each perspective is reviewed with a specific emphasis on studies investigating the relationship between organizational commitment and performance. Although there has been an underlying assumption that employees who are committed to their organizations are also the high performers, little evidence has been found to support this assumption. Activation theory is integrated into this study to discover which other factors might moderate the relationship between organizational commitment and performance. This study was conducted in a diverse sample of three organizations. Participants (n = 258) in the study were asked to complete two questionnaires, six months apart, to measure their organizational commitment, the degree of activation experienced on the job, and their performance. There were two general hypotheses tested: (1) that committed employees will only perform at high levels when they are sufficiently activated to do so, and (2) that employees who perform at high levels will become more committed over time. The first hypothesis was supported in that the results indicated that activation is an important moderator in the relationship between organizational commitment and performance. When activation was operationalized as job scope and as meaningfulness, then only those committed employees who reported having jobs with wide scope or meaningful jobs were the high performers. There was a negative relationship between organizational commitment and performance for employees with jobs with narrow scope or jobs not considered to be meaningful. These results indicate that commitment alone is not sufficient for improving organizational performance and that committed employees must be provided with interesting, challenging, and meaningful work to perform at high levels. The second hypothesis was not adequately supported, although the results approached significance. This failure to reach significance is perhaps because six months is not a sufficiently long period of time for high performance to have a significant effect on the level of commitment to the organization.
Subject Area
Management
Recommended Citation
MCCAUL, HARRIETTE STEWART, "ACTIVATION AS A MODERATOR IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND PERFORMANCE" (1986). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8704557.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8704557