Intra-national variation in organizational commitment: evidence from the Chinese context

Jos Gamble, Amy Wei Tian

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This study demonstrates how organizational commitment can differ at the sub-national level. We develop and test hypotheses based on levels of economic development and related shifts from collectivism to individualism. The data comprise 1017 retail employees drawn from two economically distinctly different parts of China. We find that organizational commitment is higher in ‘less economically developed’ regions. Affective and normative commitment (NC) negatively predicted turnover intentions, whereas continuance commitment related positively to turnover intentions. Unlike earlier findings using Western samples, this study finds the effect of NC on turnover intentions considerably stronger, suggesting that NC is more predictive of turnover intentions. As expected, our results indicate that continuance commitment is more predictive of turnover intentions in the ‘more economically developed’ regions.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)948-970
Number of pages23
JournalThe International Journal of Human Resource Management
Volume26
Issue number7
Early online date2 Oct 2012
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015

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