An Investigation of the Antecedents and Consequences of Affective Commitment in a U.S. Hospitality Organization

Abstract

The notion of affective commitment has become important in the organizational sciences. This study focused on the antecedents and the consequences of affective commitment. The antecedents include organizational commitment to employees, perceived organizational support, employee empowerment, and job satisfaction; the consequence is represented by employee perceived service quality. Previous studies suggest that affective commitment has positive effects on employees' organizational behaviors, for instance, intention to quit and job performance. In today's competitive environment, retaining committed employees is not impossible but challenging, especially in the service industry. The objective of this study was to develop a theoretical model of affective commitment and to test the relationships between affective commitment and its antecedents and consequence.

The data set for this study contained related research information from more than 4000 employees at a U.S. resort organization. To minimize the effect of large sample size, the opinions on the scope of affective commitment from 400 randomly selected hourly employees were analyzed. Using structural equation modeling technique in a two-stage approach, the theoretical model was evaluated and the hypotheses were tested. Multiple regression analysis was carried out to further identify whether employee empowerment could be used as an indicator to predict affective commitment. Additionally, 400 randomly selected cases were used to validate the model. The validation process confirmed that the initial theoretical model could be used to generalize to the population.

Results from the statistical analysis indicated that affective commitment was positively related to its antecedents and consequence: organizational commitment to employees, perceived organizational support, job satisfaction, and employee perceived service quality. In addition, organizational support to employees was found to have a positive effect on employee perceived service quality. Surprisingly, the expected relationship between employee empowerment and affective commitment was not statistically significant, neither was the expected relationship between employee empowerment and employee perceived service quality.

The findings brought some insight into the study of affective commitment. The managerial implications were explored. Additionally, limitations and future research suggestions were discussed.