Organizational Behavior Effective and Continuance Commitment

• Access throughyour institution

Original article

When does commitment backfire: Linking employee continuance commitment to silence behavior Quand l'engagement se retourne contre vous : lier l'engagement continu des employés au comportement de silence

Abstract

Introduction

Extant studies on organizational commitment emphasize affective organizational commitment and consequently ignore the unique role of continuance organizational commitment. To determine whether high continuance commitment is beneficial, we employed conservation of resources theory to explore how continuance commitment leads to emotional exhaustion and silent behavior.

Objective

This study examines the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion on the relationship between continuance commitment and silence behavior, and the moderating role of age.

Method

We recruited 157 employees in China to complete a three-wave survey measuring continuance commitment, emotional exhaustion and silence behavior, respectively.

Results

Our results show that continuance commitment is positively related to emotional exhaustion and, in turn, triggers more silent behavior, especially for those old employees; the indirect effect is more significant.

Conclusion

Although employers intend to keep human resources, this study indicates that continuance commitment may bring negative consequences. Moreover, old age will magnify the effect of continuance commitment on emotional exhaustion and further strengthen silence behavior.

Résumé

Introduction

Les études existantes sur l'engagement organisationnel mettent l'accent sur l'engagement organisationnel affectif et ignorent par conséquent le rôle unique de l'engagement organisationnel continu. Pour savoir si un engagement continu élevé est bénéfique, nous avons utilisé la théorie de la conservation des ressources pour explorer comment l'engagement continu conduit à l'épuisement émotionnel et au comportement de silence.

Objectif

Cette étude examine l'effet médiateur de l'épuisement émotionnel sur la relation entre l'engagement continu et le comportement de silence, et le rôle modérateur de l'âge.

Méthode

Nous avons recruté 157 employés en Chine pour répondre à une enquête en trois phases mesurant respectivement l'engagement continu, l'épuisement émotionnel et le comportement de silence.

Résultats

Nos résultats montrent que l'engagement continu est positivement lié à l'épuisement émotionnel et déclenche à son tour plus de comportement de silence, en particulier pour les employés âgés, l'effet indirect est plus significatif.

Conclusion

Bien que les employeurs aient l'intention de conserver leurs ressources humaines, cette étude indique que l'engagement continu peut avoir des conséquences négatives. De plus, l'âge avancé amplifie l'effet de l'engagement de continuité sur l'épuisement émotionnel et renforce le comportement de silence.

Introduction

Continuance commitment refers to the tendency to stay in current organizations for fear of losses or costs brought by turnover (Allen & Meyer, 1990). Along with affective and normative commitment, they indicate the effectiveness of organizational acts on retaining their employees (Meyer et al., 2002). It has gained extensive attention from practitioners and scholars since human resources are the core competitive resources of organizations (Meyer et al., 2002, Narayanan et al., 2019, Wasti et al., 2016).

Although it is well-established that three forms of commitment all have notable effects in reducing turnover, the different motivations behind them may have differential implications for other employee behaviors, especially for continuance commitment (Meyer et al., 2002, Nangoli et al., 2020, Wasti et al., 2016). Conceptually, continuance commitment is cost-based, and individuals with high continuance commitment are bound by the potential costs resulting from resignation and have to keep current membership in the organization. In contrast, affective and normative commitments emphasize the emotional bonds and personal responsibilities toward organizations (Allen & Meyer, 1990). The self-focused and profit-oriented commitment will not necessarily positively impact employees and may even trigger the detrimental effect. Previous studies have reported weak, and sometimes even negative, the relationship between continuance commitment and in-role performance. Meanwhile, it found that the other two types of organizational commitment are positively related to in-role performance (Dinc, 2017, Meyer et al., 2002), which implies that continuance commitment may not have an internal motivational effect on the current job affective and normative commitment do.

Extant studies on organizational commitment were typically more concerned about why and how the whole organizational commitment or affective commitment specifically influence a wide range of employee attitudes and behaviors (Mercurio, 2015, Wasti et al., 2016). The results of these researches can not be generalized to continuance commitment accordingly (Meyer et al., 2002, Nangoli et al., 2020). Furthermore, even in the relationship between organizational commitment and performance or turnover, which received extensive attention from scholars (De Clercq, Suhail, Azeem, & Haq, 2021; Nangoli et al., 2020), continuance commitment was sometimes ignored (Qureshi et al., 2019). The unintentional generalist view and ignorance of specific commitment left the problems of productivity and employee turnover unresolved till now (Nangoli et al., 2020). Although scholars suggested that the whole organizational commitment deserves further explorations (Solinger et al., 2008), the three-component model of organizational commitment is widely accepted (Choi et al., 2015), and the three components are distinct (Meyer et al., 2002). Thus, we should pay more attention to specific types of commitment, especially continuance commitment, to explore whether high commitment will definitely lead to high productivity and enrich our knowledge about the nature of different organizational commitments.

However, extant studies are limited in exploring why and how continuance commitment may affect other critical job-related behaviors (Gamble & Tian, 2015). In the current research, we contend that employees with high continuance commitment will decrease their engagement to assigned work (Meyer et al., 2002) and be indifferent toward the things the concerning organization to prevent the further resources depleted caused by continuance commitment. The indifferent attitude towards an organization is usually manifested by employee silence, defined as the behavior of withholding their opinions, information, concerns and so on about problematic situations encountered in the workplace (Van Dyne et al., 2003).

Some scholars hold the belief that silence and voice are two sides of one coin (Morrison, 2014) and tend to understand silence based on studies of voice accordingly (Chou and Chang, 2020, Sherf et al., 2021). More or less, this unconfirmed opinion and resultant research paradigms made us misunderstand the whole picture about silence. Recent studies proved that silence and voice are correlated to a small extent yet mutually independent and can be evoked from distinct psychological mechanisms (Sherf et al., 2021). The important findings, combined with the scant empirical explorations concerning antecedents of employee silence behavior (Morrison, 2014), underscore the value of further studies focusing solely on employee silence behavior (Chou & Chang, 2020). Furthermore, scholars pointed out that most studies adopt the perspective of risk-avoiding to explain employee silence behavior (Brinsfield, 2013). A different explaining mechanism is needed and worthwhile to deepen our understanding of the whole picture of employee silence behavior.

Drawing from the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989, Hobfoll and Freedy, 1993), we posit that high continuance commitment is a strong workplace stressor. Those employees expended too much before thus focused their attention on the potential loss and were consequently trapped in the organization (Lapointe et al., 2011), which is highly tense and resource-consuming (Panaccio & Vandenberghe, 2009). The forced lasting consumption of personal resources, induced by the intention to retain membership, will lead to a depleted state (i.e., emotional exhaustion; Wang, 2015). It, in turn, will contribute to employee silence behavior, since individuals with few resources are more sensitive to resources loss and tend to decrease the investment of resources in uncertain and risky conditions (Hobfoll, 1989, Hobfoll and Freedy, 1993).

Since conservation of resources theory suggests that fewer resources make individuals be more sensitive to resources loss and tend to keep the remaining resources (Hobfoll, 1989, Hobfoll and Freedy, 1993). We proposed that employee age, as one demographic variable, may moderate the effects of continuance commitment on emotional exhaustion. As people age after entering the workplace, they confront more cognitive, emotional, and role demands and physical ageing (Hobfoll & Wells, 1998). All these requests resource consuming. Thus, those older employees who face stressful conditions are more vulnerable to resources loss than younger employees (Treadway et al., 2005), experience more negative feelings accordingly and respond more negatively in behaviors. On the basis of these, our aim is to propose a moderated mediation model to test the psychological mechanism between continuance commitment and silence behavior under the intervention of employee age. The proposed theoretical model of our research is given in Fig. 1.

Taken together, the theoretical contributions of this study are as follows. First, our study offers the conservation of resources perspective to elucidate the psychological mechanism by which an employee with continuance commitment may show more silent behavior, which deepens our understanding of the negative consequences and its functioning process of continuance commitment and enriches theories in the field of organizational commitment. Second, we extend the research on age differences by incorporating it as an influential boundary condition into the model. Scholars found that age will influence personal time focus (Carstensen et al., 1999) and work motives (Kooij et al., 2011). However, other demographics were usually treated as control variables, which limited our understanding of its role in daily work behaviors. We examined whether employee age moderated the impact of continuance commitment on silence behavior, providing a potential perspective for the important role of age differences in the study of management (Brienza & Bobocel, 2017). Third, our results expand the previous research on silence behavior. We rigorously explored the positive correlation between continuance commitment and employee silence behavior, and examined the psychological mechanism represented by emotional exhaustion.

Section snippets

Theory and hypotheses

The concept of continuance commitment highlights the importance of personal gains, as it is usually motivated by fear of potential personal losses brought by resignation (Allen & Meyer, 1990). Becker (1960) also pointed out that as we invest so many resources in the current job, we hardly quit without considering gains and losses. What is worse, we must keep investing in meaningless things to avoid huge losses (Jaros et al., 1993). Thus, the compulsive nature of daily work may cost more

Continuance commitment, emotional exhaustion and keeping silence

Based on the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989, Hobfoll and Freedy, 1993), individuals with high continuance commitment need to stay in the current organization because of the anticipated potential loss. In order to maintain their membership in the organization, individuals with high continuance commitment must meet the standards of job performance (Meyer et al., 2004, Wang, 2015), which means that there are stable daily demands of personal resources to complete tasks.

The moderating role of age

Conservation of resources theory emphasizes the retainment of personal resources; individuals will not do risky activities if enough resources do not support them, and they will pay more attention to the loss when there are fewer resources left (Hobfoll, 1989, Hobfoll and Freedy, 1993, Hobfoll and Wells, 1998). What is worse, the theory pointed out that individuals have to invest resources to protect against resource loss and finally be trapped in loss spirals. Following this logic, if someone

Participants and procedure

After the approval of the research ethics board, we distributed questionnaires to participants through Credamo, a platform similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk (Duan et al., 2020). All participants can decide to participate or not independently and freely, and they can quit at any stage in this platform. Before the survey, our instruction showed and informed potential participants that this study aims to investigate workplace behavior. They should rate the items according to experience and quit at

Preliminary analysis

Before testing our hypotheses, we conducted a series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) to examine our measurement model. In order to mitigate the potential parameter estimation bias caused by a large number of items relative to the sample size (Little et al., 2002), we decided to parcel the measure of emotional exhaustion, which is comprised of most items in our model (i.e., 9 items). Following Matsunaga's (2008) suggestion, we randomly parceled the nine items into three parcels, in which

Discussion

Although employees are commonly expected to have high organizational commitments (Narayanan et al., 2019), the high continuance of organizational commitment can be detrimental. Since they are already depletion, it is impossible that they are willing to identify problems and propose solutions in the workplace. Through a three-wave survey, we found that when employees were trapped in their organization for costs of turnover, they must invest additional resources to control personal behavior,

Theoretical implications

Thus, our work contributes to organizational commitment and silence behavior literature in the following ways. Firstly, our study deepens our understanding of the negative consequences of continuance commitment and enriches the theory in this field. Extant studies involving organizational commitment may exist problems of overgeneralization, given the diverse motivations behind the high commitment. Scholars tend to describe affective commitment as organizational commitment (Deniz et al., 2013,

Practical implications

Based on our results, we think there are some implications for managers. First of all, it is not good enough to keep the high commitment of employees. When employees stay in the organization for potential losses, they usually contribute nothing and even bring detrimental effects. Employees may fall into a vicious spiral because of the reciprocal relationship between emotional exhaustion and employee silence behavior (Knoll et al., 2018), which does not benefit themselves and organizations (

Limitations and future directions

Some limitations should be noted. First, we collected data from Chinese, who tend to be humble and shy (Zhang et al., 1999). Namely, national culture may be a potential factor influencing the outcomes. Thus, future studies could examine whether the cultural effect exists. Second, we believe that collecting more information, such as employees' affective commitment and voice behavior, will provide a clearer picture of the relationship between continuance commitment and employee silence behavior.

Conclusion

Although commitment is essential to an organization, certain facets of commitment can be detrimental. The current study found that continuance commitment is positively related to employee silence through emotional exhaustion. Besides, employee age is an important boundary condition. Based on these results, we hope future studies can further explore how and when employee continuance commitment is more likely to bring adverse consequences. In addition, our research also provides important

Disclosure of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interest.

Acknowledgement

We fully acknowledge the funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72072058).

References (63)

• et al.

  The bad boss takes it all: How abusive supervision and leader-member exchange interact to influence employee silence

  The Leadership Quarterly

  (2015)

• W. Rivkin et al.

  Affective commitment as a moderator of the adverse relationships between day-specific self-control demands and psychological well-being

  Journal of Vocational Behavior

  (2015)

• A. Panaccio et al.

  Perceived organizational support, organizational commitment and psychological well-being: A longitudinal study

  Journal of Vocational Behavior

  (2009)

• J.P. Meyer et al.

  Affective, continuance, and normative commitment to the organization: A meta-analysis of antecedents, correlates, and consequences

  Journal of Vocational Behavior

  (2002)

• N. Deniz et al.

  The relationship between employee silence and organizational commitment in a private healthcare company

  Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences

  (2013)

• A. Christmann et al.

  Robust estimation of Cronbach's alpha

  Journal of Multivariate Analysis

  (2006)

• Z.X. Chen et al.

  The relationship between the three components of commitment and employee performance in China

  Journal of Vocational Behavior

  (2003)

• N.J. Allen et al.

  The measurement and antecedents of affective, continuance and normative commitment to the organization

  Journal of Occupational Psychology

  (1990)

• H.S. Becker

  Notes on the concept of commitment

  American Journal of Sociology

  (1960)

• L.R. Bolton et al.

  Counterproductive work behaviours in response to emotional exhaustion: A moderated mediational approach

  Stress and Health

  (2012)

J.P. Brienza et al.

Employee age alters the effects of justice on emotional exhaustion and organizational deviance

Frontiers in Psychology

(2017)

C.T. Brinsfield

Employee silence motives: Investigation of dimensionality and development of measures

Journal of Organizational Behavior

(2013)

R.W. Brislin

Translation and content analysis of oral and written material

L.L. Carstensen et al.

Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity

American Psychologist

(1999)

D. Choi et al.

Understanding organizational commitment: A meta-analytic examination of the roles of the five-factor model of personality and culture

Journal of Applied Psychology

(2015)

S.Y. Chou et al.

Employee silence and silence antecedents: A theoretical classification

International Journal of Business Communication

(2020)

M.S. Cole et al.

Organizational justice and individuals' withdrawal: Unlocking the influence of emotional exhaustion

Journal of Management Studies

(2010)

D. De Clercq et al.

Citizenship pressure and job performance: roles of citizenship fatigue and continuance commitment

Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources

(2021)

J.A. DeSimone et al.

Best practice recommendations for data screening

Journal of Organizational Behavior

(2015)

M.S. Dinc

Organizational commitment components and job performance: Mediating role of job satisfaction

Pakistan Journal of Commerce and Social Sciences

(2017)

J. Duan et al.

Authoritarian leadership and employee silence in China

Journal of Management & Organization

(2018)

J. Duan et al.

How enhancing employee well-being can encourage voice behavior: A desire fulfillment perspective

Human Performance

(2020)

C. Fernet et al.

The effects of work motivation on employee exhaustion and commitment: An extension of the JD-R model

Work & Stress

(2012)

L. Festinger

A theory of cognitive dissonance

(1957)

J. Gamble et al.

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

The International Journal of Human Resource Management

(2015)

Y. Han et al.

The effects of perceived supervisor incivility on child-care workers' job performance: The mediating role of emotional exhaustion and intrinsic motivation

Current Psychology

(2021)

S.E. Hobfoll

Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress

The American Psychologist

(1989)

S.E. Hobfoll

Conservation of resource caravans and engaged settings

Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology

(2011)

S.E. Hobfoll et al.

Conservation of resources: A general stress theory applied to burnout. In: Professional burnout: Recent developments in theory and research

(1993)

S.E. Hobfoll et al.

Conservation of resources, stress, and aging

S.J. Jaros et al.

Effects of continuance, affective, and moral commitment on the withdrawal process: An evaluation of eight structural equation models

Academy of Management

(1993)

Cited by (0)

Recommended articles (0)

View full text

© 2022 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

pereznout1976.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1162908822000482

Share this post