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John P Meyer and Natalie J. Allen. Commitment in the Workplace: Theory, Research and Application. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997, 150 pages, $34.00 hardcover, $15.95 softcover.
Reviewed by Herschel N. Chait, Associate Professor of Management, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN.
Depending on which lens you use, this book is either valuable and stimulating or it is a long, and sometimes confusing, journey that arrives at conclusions that are widely known. Researchers in organizational behavior will see it as an up-to-date review of the organizational commitment literature and an almost inexhaustible supply of research suggestions. Practitioners, on the other hand, will be bewildered by how much is not known about organizational commitment, will find that the suggestions for practice are not new, and may even wonder whether the topic is worth discussing at all.
Meyer and Allen are leading researchers in the field of organizational commitment. Their stated goal in writing this book is to summarize their view of organizational commitment, its causes, and consequences. They admit starting with three biases. The first is a bias toward quantitative empirical research-and most of the book's material comes from that literature. Second, the authors limit their focus to the employee's commitment to the organization as a whole, rather than to a team or profession. Third, they adopt the view that organizational commitment is a complex and multidimensional process.
The book is organized into seven chapters and an appendix. The first chapter is introductory and makes the argument that the concept of organizational commitment remains relevant despite recent changes in the work place. In the second chapter, Meyer and Allen present their multidimensional view of organizational commitment. They propose that commitment consists of three components: affective (emotional attachment to the organization), continuance (attachment to the organization because of the cost of leaving), and normative (a sense of obligation to continue with the organization). The authors note that individuals may be committed to the organization, the unit, the supervisor, and/or the work group. They concede that the result is a multidimensional framework in which, for example, individuals may...