Organizational Commitment

In organizational behavior and industrial and organizational psychology, organizational commitment is the individual's psychological attachment to the organization. The basis behind many of these studies was to find ways to improve how workers feel about their jobs so that these workers would become more committed to their organizations. Organizational commitment predicts work variables such as turnover, organizational citizenship behavior, and job performance. Some of the factors such as role stress, empowerment, job insecurity and employability, and distribution of leadership have been shown to be connected to a worker's sense of organizational commitment.

Organizational commitment can be contrasted with other work-related attitudes, such as job satisfaction, defined as an employee's feelings about their job, and organizational identification, defined as the degree to which an employee experiences a 'sense of oneness' with their organization.

Organizational scientists have also developed many nuanced definitions of organizational commitment, and numerous scales to measure them. Exemplary of this work is Meyer and Allen's model of commitment, which was developed to integrate numerous definitions of commitment that had been proliferated in the literature. Meyer and Allen's model has also been critiqued because the model is not consistent with empirical findings. There has also been debate surrounding what Meyers and Allen's model was trying to achieve.