Affective, normative, and continuance commitment levels across cultures
: A meta-analysis
/ John P. Meyer...[ET.AL]
CO-AUTHORS: David J. Stanley, Timothy A. Jackson, Kate J. McInnis, Elyse R. Maltin, Leah Sheppard
With increasing globalization of business and diversity within the workplace, there has been growing interest in cultural differences in employee commitment. We used meta-analysis to compute mean levels of affective (AC; K=966, N=433,129), continuance (CC; K=428, N=199,831), and normative (NC; K=336, N=133,277) organizational commitment for as many as 54 countries and nine geographic regions, and used cultural values/practices from the Hofstede (2001), Schwartz (2006), and GLOBE (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) taxonomies to account for observed variance. We found that cultural values/ practices explained the greatest amount of variance in NC, followed by AC; they did not explain variance in CC. When economic indicators were controlled, Schwartz's value orientations accounted for the most incremental variance, particularly in NC. We provide country-level normative data for the three components of commitment and discuss the implications of our findings for multi-national organizations as well as for companies employing individuals with varying cultural backgrounds.