Commitment to Work

How Committed Are You?

Are you ready to leave your job? What’s your commitment level? If I were to match your salary and benefits would you consider putting in your notice?

Your answer depends on several factors, but one important one is how committed you are to your current employer. If you’re committed, it can be great news for you and your boss, but how are you committed? It turns out there are three ways you can commit and they’re not all equal or even good.

John Meyer and Natalie Allen are experts in workplace commitment and they detail years of research findings in their book “Commitment in the Workplace.” One of their most basic findings is that there are three components to commitment: affective commitment, normative commitment, and continuance commitment. Don’t let your eyes start glazing over yet, let me explain.

Continuance Commitment — “Need to”

Does the thought of changing jobs sound like way too big of a pain? Has your salary grown so much over the course of years that you’re doubtful you could find a matching salary somewhere else? Do you think you might be too old to get hired? Are your skills getting rusty to such an extent that it would be a handicap to finding a new job? Do you do something so specialized that few places demand your expertise?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, you have continuance commitment, or “need to” commitment. There can be many reasons for this aspect of commitment, but they all come down to one conclusion: You’re committed to your job not because you connect with it or love it, but because it’s simply too difficult or maybe impossible to leave it.

Normative Commitment — “Ought to”

What if the thought of leaving your job is appealing, but your boss recently did you a huge favor and you’d feel guilty leaving? Perhaps you or one of your children was ill and the company went out of its way to accommodate your extensive time off? Did you get your job because of a friend in the company and quitting would seem rude? Are you working in a family business and leaving would be seen as a slap in the face to your mom or dad? Is much of your circle of friends made up of people you met on the job? Would they shun you if you left?

These are signs of normative commitment, or “ought to” commitment. Just like with continuance commitment, there can be many reasons for it, but you’re not staying because of a connection to the work or the workplace. You stay because there is social pressure to do so.

Affective Commitment — “Want to”

Finally, what if you don’t want to leave your job because you really believe in the company’s mission? Are you staying because coming into work fulfills you in some way? Do you feel challenged and that you’re making important contributions to the company? Do you perhaps get to use a variety of skills and have a large degree of control over your work? Are you happy enough with your job that you’re skeptical you could find something similar elsewhere?

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re experiencing affective commitment, or “want to” commitment. You’re staying in your job simply because you want to. You enjoy doing what you do and get satisfaction from doing it well. The only pressure you experience to stay is the pressure you place on yourself, and it’s a pretty satisfying sort of pressure.

Which do you want?

Now let’s forget all of this applying to your commitment to your job — think about it from the perspective of a manager. What aspect of commitment would you want your employees to experience? Would you want them to stay because they have no other choice? Maybe you’d be happy to coerce them into staying by piling on heaps of guilt? Simply from the definitions above, you’re probably thinking the goal should be affective commitment, and you’d be right.

In fact the reality is that people experience all three of the components of commitment to varying degrees, but there is likely to be one component that outweighs the others. If that component is affective/want to commitment, then there can be some exceptionally positive results.

Benefits of Affective Commitment

People experiencing affective commitment are less likely to take unplanned time off. These workers are also inclined to exhibit organizational citizenship behavior — the tendency to go out of their way in their jobs and to promote the goals of the company. It’s a side effect of dedicated, engaged workers and should be something all managers should work toward.

More than that, employees with affective commitment simply do their jobs better. When they have sufficient control over their work, these employees are highly likely to work hard to excel in the aspects of their jobs they feel are important to the success of the organization and they’re much less likely to say things like, “that’s not my job.” Even though they may work hard and voluntarily put in long hours, people with affective commitment report smaller degrees of job stress than those with no or other aspects of commitment.

How do I get it?

Organizational commitment is a huge topic and I’ll have much more to say about it in future posts, but it is important to mention briefly how managers can achieve affective commitment in their employees.

First, employees develop this component of commitment by simply being happy in their jobs. If they feel fulfilled, challenged, and empowered, they’ll be much more likely to develop affective commitment. They’ll also develop it if they get to use a variety of their skills and if they know what’s expected of them in their jobs and have control over meeting those expectations. Most important, people will want to commit to their jobs if they sense an overarching attitude of fairness and respect. Organizations that enjoy high degrees of affective commitment are those that promote from within, are open to input from employees when making important decisions, clearly communicate policy decisions, and make such decisions with the good of employees in mind.

Motive Matters

This all sounds great and straightforward enough, right? Hold your horses because there’s a big catch: Employees are smart and they’ll see right through insincere attempts to build commitment. What you want and what you do hardly matter at all — what truly matters is the perception of your actions in the workplace. If you try to build commitment because your boss told you to or because you read a blog post about it recently and want to wring a few more hours out of your workers, then it’ll never happen. Do it for the right reasons or not at all.

If however you work toward fostering the good aspects of commitment, the “want to” commitment, because you genuinely care about your employees and want to build a positive and productive workplace, then your people are quite likely to play along and everyone will reap the rewards. If you do it right, I’ll be able to ask anyone in your team if they’d like to leave their jobs and the response will be, “no way, I love it here!”