A closer look into the employee influence. Organizational commitment relationship by distinguishing between commitment forms and influence sources
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425451311279384 |
| Published date | 09 November 2012 |
| Pages | 4-19 |
| Date | 09 November 2012 |
| Author | Thomas Jønsson,Hans Jeppe Jeppesen |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
A closer look into the
employee influence
Organizational commitment relationship
by distinguishing between commitment
forms and influence sources
Thomas Jønsson and Hans Jeppe Jeppesen
Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences,
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to elucidate the relationship between perceived employee
influence and organizational commitment by applying a multidimensional approach that includes
influence perceived to stem from the individual and the team, as well as affective and normative
commitment.
Design/methodology/approach – A total of 526 out of a population of 732 employees (72 percent
reply rate) from four Danish companies in different industries and with different types of teams
participated in the questionnaire study.
Findings – Results of bootstrapping mediation analyses reveal that a relationship between perceived
influence of the team and affective commitment is fully mediated by perceived individual influence.
Results of multiple regression analyses show a positive relationship between team and individual
influence, and that normative commitment moderated the relationship negatively. The results are to
suggest that influence of the team may stimulate employees’ individual influence, and in turn their
affective commitment, if their normative commitment is not very high.
Research limitations/implications – Generalization of the results to cultures, which are dissimilar
to the Danish should be cautiously considered and further studies are needed to elucidate causality
between the variables.
Originality/value – The identification of normative commitment as a variable that can potentially
hinder that employees experience their teams to enhance their individual freedom elucidates the
conditions that may be behind different current findings in the literature. The finding that suggests
that employees need to perceive that they benefit from their team’s influence in order to feel more
affective committed to their organization adds to knowledge about team work’s possible effects for
employee attitudes.
Keywords Employees participation, Employees relations, Teamwork, Organizational commitment,
Normative control, Concertive control, Denmark
Paper type Research paper
A key target within the field of organizational behavior is to achieve a better
understanding of why and how employees decide to remain with the organization
and involve themselves in the organization’s tasks and challenges. Since the 1960s,
the construct of organizational commitment has been developed to g rasp this aspect
of the relationship between employees and the organization. The concept of
commitment in organizations refers to an employee’s attachment to his organization
or to organizational dimensions (Klein et al., 2009). In the early 1990s, Meyer and
Allen (1991), Meyer et al. (1993) integrated the extant literature on organizational
commitment in a three-dimensional concept consisting of affective, continuance
and normative commitment dimensions. The value of organizational commitment is
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
Employee Relations
Vol. 35 No. 1, 2013
pp. 4-19
rEmeraldGroup PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/01425451311279384
4
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35,1
assumed in the organizational theories and strategic approaches to perso nnel
management that prescribe employee p articipation initiatives with the aim of
enhancing commitment and performance. As a strategy aimed to increase utilization
of employees’ resources, some HRM policies have the intention to deal with and affect
the employees’ mindset and their attitude towards work and the organization.
By implication, enhancing organizational commitment is a key target within HRM
(Guest, 1992; Storey, 1995), organizational theory (Walton, 1985) and high commitment
work practices or high involvement management (Gollan, 2005). A central tenet of
these approaches is that employee participation and influence stimulates commitment
and performance. In general, a substantial amount of evidence supp ort this notion
(e.g. Cordery et al., 1991; Laschinger et al., 2004; Lines, 2004; Scott-Ladd et al., 2006;
Rasmussen and Jeppesen, 2006). However, in practice employee participation can have
very different configurations. It can deal with work issues as well as organizational
issues but research suggests that influence on work issues is stronger related to
employee attitudes than organizational issues (e.g. attitudes such as organizational
identification – Jønsson, 2006). Employee influence on work typically stem from
delegations of authority to the single employee or whole teams of employees. So far,
little research has included both individuals and teams as sources of employee
influence in the extant investigations of the relationship between employee influence
and organizational commitment. This distinction raises the question about the
relationship between team and individual and a debate has taken place about whether
teams deliberate or oppress the freedom of the single team members (Marchington,
2000), i.e. whether employees experience their teams’ influence to be negatively related
to their own, individual influence. The p ower dynamics between individuals and teams
may further have different consequences for the employee’s commitment. On the other
hand, commitment may be an intermediate variable in this dynamics: commitment has
itself been perceived as a cause of disempowerment of individual membe rs (cf. Randall,
1987), as commitment to organizational goals and values may be a key mechanism in
how teams oppress individual members’ voice and influence.
We want to contribute to clarification of the issue by investigating the connection
between the employees’ perceptions of influence stemming from the team and the
individual employee, respectively. Moreover, we investigate the role of commitment in
this relationship, i.e. as both possible intermediary and effect variables.
A better understanding of these issues may have practical perspectives for
participativeorganizational and work designsthat rely on employeeinfluence to enhance
organizational commitment may be improved without unintentionally restraining the
employees’ influence and, in turn, hindering realization of human resources.
1. Background
1.1 A multidimensional approach to commitment
Meyer and Allen (1991), Meyer (1997), Meyer et al. (1993) attempt to capture
the diversity of the then existing conceptualizations of commitment with their three-
dimensional measure of organizational commitment. Their approach has been the most
applied conceptualization and measurement instrument of o rganizational commitment
(Cohen, 2007). Continuance commitment is based on an assumption of an economic
exchange between the employee and the organization and it is primarily associated
with turnover cognitions and to a lesser extent with person and organizational
variables (Meyer et al., 2002). Since the present study does not focus on turn-over
cognitions, we found no cause for including continuance commitment in the analyses.
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The employee
influence
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