The relationship among organizational involvement, commitment, and success: a case study of Amway Corporation

Traditionally, organizational commitment has been proposed as an important factor leading to desired behavioral consequences (Angle and Perry, 1981). Organizationally-committed individuals remain in an organization, perform reliably, and are even willing to make contributions to an organization's operation which go beyond what is expected of them (Schein, l980; Steers, 1977).

One company that seems to rely heavily on the organizational commitment or its participants is Amway Corporation. Amway Corporation is a multi-level direct sales company that specializes in personal and home care products. In just 25 years it has grown from a low-budget company serving a regional market into a multimillion dollar corporation with markets in over 45 countries and territories and approximately one million distributors.

Although some of Amway's remarkable organizational success must be attributed to product quality and its dynamic and inclusive recruitment policy, it seems possible that much of Amway's success must be traced back to the organizational commitment of its distributors. Amway Corporation attempts to enhance distributor commitment to the organization by providing material and non-material incentives, thereby promoting what Weber ( t 978) referred to as instrumental and value-rational, as well as affective forms of social action.

The present study focused on the following research questions: What is the relationship between organizational commitment and successful Amway distributor task performance? What effect does the nature of distributor's organizational involvement have on the relationship between organizational commitment and distributor success? What role docs emotional attachment to Amway play in promoting successful distributor task performance?

These different types of social action suggest different types of organizational involvement that might be exhibited by individuals in a complex organization. Based largely on the theoretical work of Etzioni (1961, 1975), and Clark and Wilson (1975), organizational involvement is conceptualized in the present study as the importance or material, purposive, and solidary incentives for distributor's continuing participation in Amway, and may be distinguished into two types: calculative and moral.

Based on data collected on 121 Amway distributors, using two separate samples, this study found that there is a positive relationship between organizational commitment and distributor success. It was also found that organizational involvement and commitment are highly related. The hypothesis proposing that combining calculative and moral involvement greatly enhances the relationship between organizational commitment and overall distributor success was not supported. Calculative involvement and organizational commitment were found to have an interactive effect on overall distributor success. It was found that various time-use factors, such as number of months respondents had been in Amway, number of hours spent weekly motivating downline distributors, and the number of hours spent weekly selling products were also related to overall distributor success. The total number of hours spent weekly on Amway-related activities, and the number of hours spent weekly showing the Amway Sales and Marketing Plan were not significantly related to overall distributor success.