When normative commitment leads to lower well-being and reduced performance

Christian Vandenberghe, Karim Mignonac () and Caroline Manville ()
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Christian Vandenberghe: HEC Montréal - HEC Montréal
Karim Mignonac: CRM - Centre de Recherche en Management - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - IAE - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Toulouse - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Caroline Manville: CRM - Centre de Recherche en Management - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - IAE - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Toulouse - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: Normative commitment, or employees' loyalty to their organization based on a sense of obligation, has received less attention than affective and continuance commitment. Building on recent work suggesting that normative commitment's meaning is influenced by the within-person context provided by the other components of commitment, we theorized that normative commitment would be experienced as externally driven, hence detrimental to well-being and performance, when few alternatives commitment, a sub-component of continuance commitment, is high. Based on two independent samples (Ns = 366 and 100), Study 1 found normative commitment to be more positively related to emotional exhaustion and psychological distress at high levels of few alternatives commitment. Study 2 (N = 187) found normative commitment to be less positively related to job performance when few alternatives commitment was high. Implications of these findings for our understanding of normative commitment's workings are highlighted.

Keywords: "emotional exhaustion"; "few alternatives commitment"; "job performance"; "normative commitment"; "psychological distress" (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Human Relations, 2015, 68 (5), pp.843-870. ⟨10.1177/0018726714547060⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01235624

DOI: 10.1177/0018726714547060

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