A survey on critical factors influencing organizational commitment

Article history: Received October 28, 2013 Received in revised format 25 November 2013 Accepted 29 January 2014 Available online February 2 2014 Organizational commitment is an important issue and organization attitude has become an area of study among many researchers in the fields of organizational behavior. In fact, there are many studies on human resource management where the effects of organizational commitment on other issues have been investigated and the purpose of this research is to find critical factors influencing on organizational commitment. Based on an exploration of the literature review and interviews, the proposed study of this paper extracts 24 variables and using factor analysis, we select the most important factors, which are grouped in four categories. The implementation of our factor analysis has revealed Affective commitment, Continuous commitment, Moral commitment and Enduring commitment are the most important factors influencing organizational commitment. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
The concept of organizational commitment has attracted considerable attention during the recent years and it has become a central objective of human resource management (HRM).Organizational commitment has been studied in the public, private, and non-profit sector, and more recently internationally.Early research focused on defining the concept and current research continues to explore organizational commitment through two popular approaches, commitment-related attitudes and commitment-related behaviors.A variety of antecedents and outcomes has been detected in the past few decades (Angle & Perry, 1981;Mowday et al., 1982;Hall, 1977).In the present study, we try to find critical factors influencing organizational commitment in Alfa governmental organization in Iran.In fact, employee commitment to the organization is a crucial issue in today's changing world and it can be an important instrument for improving the performance of the firms (Alimohammadi & Neyshabor (2013).According to Guest (1987), HRM policies are designed to maximize organizational integration, employee commitment, flexibility and quality of work.In our study, commitment can be described as attachment and loyalty.Individuals can display this attachment and loyalty in different levels including job, profession, department, boss or organization.More specifically, Porter et al. (1974) defined organizational commitment as "strong belief in and acceptance of the organizational goals and values, willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization, and a definite desire to maintain organizational membership".There are many definitions about commitment.We can consider commitment as a kind of obligation, which limits individual's free will (Oxford Dictionary, 1969).There are many reasons why an organization should increase the level of commitment in its members (Blanchard, 1999).In general, there are three dimensions of commitment including continuance commitment, affective commitment and normative commitment (Allen & Meyer, 1996;Karrasch, 2003;Turner & Chelladurai, 2005;Greenberg, 2005;Boehman, 2006;Canipe, 2006).All these issues are independent in nature and they are shown by individuals in various levels in organization (Allen & Meyer, 1996).

The proposed study
The proposed study of this paper investigates the impact of important factors on organizational commitment in a governmental organization in Iran.The proposed study designs a questionnaire consists of 24 questions in Likert scale.We have used Cronbach alpha to verify the reliability of the questionnaire and it yielded 0.865, which is well above the minimum desirable level of 0.70.Since factor analysis is sensitive against Skewness of the data, we have decided to remove four questions from the survey.Next, the implementation of factor analysis has determined four factors where each one includes three to seven variables.

The results
In this section, we present details of our survey on factor analysis.

Affective commitment
The first variable of the factor analysis is associated with Affective commitment.This factor includes five variables including Be happy to spend the rest of career in the organization, Really feel the organization problems as own problem , Having a great personal sense of the organization, Having a great sense of belonging to the organization and Believe to be better to spend most of career life in one organization.Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 78.9% and Table 1 shows details of our findings.As we can observe from the results of Table 1, in terms of affective commitment, it is important to believe that it is a good idea for an employee to spend most of his/her time only in one organization.
In addition, employees have to feel happy on being employed in the organization and they must feel that firms' problems are their own problems.

3.2.Continuous commitment
The second variable of the factor analysis is associated with continuous commitment.This factor includes seven variables summarized in Table 2 and Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 68.5%.Need to waiver of exclusive personal benefits in the organization that may be unavailable for another 0.677 According to the results of Table 2, when employees feel they are facing limited numbers of opportunities, they may decide to stay in firm and become committed to firm.In other words, fear of the consequences of leaving the current job without access to other job opportunities is the most important factor for having continuous commitment.

Moral commitment
Moral commitment is the third components of factor analysis and it includes three factors.Cronbach alpha is reported as 72.3% and details are given in Table 3 as follows, As we can observe from the results of Table 3, "Having much emotional interest to the organization: is the most important factor followed by "Seem unethical to moving from one organization to another" and "Feeling the right to leave the organization if a better job offer received".

Enduring commitment
Enduring commitment is the fourth item in our survey with four factors including believing to be always loyal to the organization, believing to loyalty is important and therefore feeling a sense of obligation to remaining in the organization, believe in the value of remaining loyal to one organization, believing to be a 'company man' is sensible.In this section, Cronbach alpha is reported as 78.5% and details are given in Table 4 as follows, Among the factors reported in Table 4, believing to be a 'company man' is the most important factor followed by "believing to be always loyal to the organization", "believe in the value of remaining loyal to one organization" and "believing to loyalty is important and therefore feeling a sense of obligation to remaining in the organization".

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical survey to detect important factors influencing organizational commitment.The implementation of our factor analysis has revealed four factors including affective commitment, Continuous commitment, Moral commitment, Enduring commitment.In terms of organizational commitment, it is important for an organization to help employees to believe that the firm is the most important place to work.In our survey, fear of the consequences of leaving the current job without access to other job opportunities may be considered as the most important factor to create organization commitment.Having much emotional interest to organization is believed to build moral commitment.Finally, believing to be a 'company man' is sensible is the most important item to build enduring commitment.

Table 1
Details of factor analysis for affective commitment surrounding Organizational commitment

Table 2
Details of factor analysis for Continuous commitment

Table 3
Details of factor analysis for Moral commitment factors in Organizational commitment

Table 4
Details of factor analysis for Enduring commitment in Organizational commitment