Company Prospects and Employee Commitment: an Analysis of the Dimensionality of the BOCS and the Influence of External Events on Those Dimensions
| Author | T. Morris,P. Winfrow,M.P. Fenton‐O’Creevy,H. Lydka |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00070 |
| Date | 01 December 1997 |
| Published date | 01 December 1997 |
British Journal of IndustrialRelations
35:4 December 1997 0007–1080 pp. 593–608
Company Prospects and Employee
Commitment: an Analysis of the
Dimensionality of the BOCS and the
Influence of External Events on Those
Dimensions
M. P. Fenton-O’Creevy, P. Winfrow, H. Lydka and
T. Morris
Abstract
The study described in this paper addressed two key objectives. Using
structural equation modelling, the study examined first the dimensionality of
the British Organizational Commitment Scale (BOCS) and second, how
employee perceptions of their company’s prospects and their perceptions of
their own career opportunities might affect each commitment dimension.
Analysis of the data (from an oil company) suggests that the BOCS has three
principal dimensions but that there is a fourth (measurement artefact) factor,
consisting of the negatively phraseditems. Analysis also reveals that improved
company prospects are positively related to the ‘loyalty’ dimension of the
BOCS but are inversely related to the ‘involvement’ dimension. The paper
considers explanations for this phenomenon.
1. Introduction
The commitment of employees has become an important management issue
in recent years because of the perceived benefits (e.g. in terms of improved
job performance and reduced labour turnover) that are assumed to flow
from it (Guest 1992). Much of the practical interest has focused on high
commitment among teams of workers as a way of generating flexible
working, innovative problem solving and high levels of performance
(Walton 1985; Mathiau and Zajac 1990; Wood and Albanese 1995). In
addition, retaining loyal workers rather than using shorter-term ‘hire-and-
fire’ methods may be beneficial to customer service and quality.
The authors are at the Open University Business School and London Business School, Centre
for Organizational Research.
¥ Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd,
108 Cowley Road,Oxford, OX4 1JF, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
594 British Journal of Industrial Relations
None the less, there remain doubts about the conceptual underpinnings of
organizational commitment and the utility of its scales of measurement. The
best-known instrument, the Organisation Commitment Questionnaire, has
been criticized for confusing commitment and its outcomes, and although
other scales of measurement have been developed, they too have come in
for criticism (Dunham et al. 1994). Underlying these methodological
problems is a question of whether organization commitment can still be
treated as a unidimensional construct or whether it has several components
with discrete antecedents and consequences. The lack of a cle ar and unifying
concept with clear causal chains reflects the lack of time-related studies of
organization commitment and the definitional confusion which has led to a
proliferation of overlapping concepts.
In this context, the purpose of this paper is two-fold. The first is
methodologicial: it examines the dimensionality of the British Organiza-
tional Commitment Scale (BOCS), which ‘should be seen as a UK
alternative to the OCQ and is the main measure of OC which has been used
in the UK’ (Peccei and Guest 1993: 3). Thus, the relationships between the
three components of the BOCS are examined and the relative merits of the
shorter six-item scale versus the longer nine-item scale that includes three
negatively worded items are tested. To do this we use structural equation
modelling (SEM) to carry out a series of confirmatory factor analyses.
A second objective was to make a contribution to our understanding of
the antecedents of organizational commitme nt and its subcomponents. This
involved a survey of employees in one company, an oilexploration business,
to see how perceptions of the prospects of the employing organization might
affect this. Of course, companies that operate in competitive markets are
not wholly in charge of their own fate. Thus, by addressing the issue of
company and industry prospects, the research was exploring how factors
that are external to the organization itself might affect employee commit-
ment, an issue that has not been explicitly cons idered before.
2. Background
There now exists an extensive literature on organizational commitment
concerning its definition, antecedents and consequences, although the
findings have produced inconsistent results and the conceptual underpin-
nings remain unclear. Generally, ‘ commitment’ tends to refer to the bond or
affective attachment employees may feel towards their employer’s per-
ceived values and goals over and above a purely instrumental relationship
(Bateman and Strasser 1984; Buchanan 1974). Extensive reviews of the
literature on organization commitment, including a number of meta-
analyses, have been published, and so in this section we will concentrate on a
more specific objective, namely to explain how the BOCS is derived and
describe its component parts before presenting the empirical data through
which we pursued our methodological and substantive goa ls.
¥ Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 1997.
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