Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Due to the cost of staff turnover and the role of human resources in a company's competitive advantage ([49] Pfeffer, 1994), employee attachment to organisations remains an important topic of research ([15] Coyle-Shapiro and Shore, 2007; [53] Rousseau, 1990). Extant research suggests that there are two perspectives regarding employee attachment: one stream focusing on the issue of commitment between employee and organisation (e.g. [3] Allen and Meyer, 1990; [47] Mowday et al. , 1979; [48] O'Reilly and Chatman, 1986), and the other addressing the notion of employee identity based on the organisation, i.e. organisational identification (e.g. [8] Ashforth and Mael, 1989; [39] Mael and Ashforth, 1992).
Given the accumulated volume of findings on these two approaches to employee attachment, it is surprising to see little research that analyses the relationship between commitment and identification (e.g. [1] Abrams et al. , 1998; [21] Foreman and Whetten, 2002; [42] Meyer et al. , 2006). A recent review by [9] Ashforth et al. (2008) suggests that there are parallels between these two perspectives and conclude that more efforts should be put into integrating commitment and identification in order to make more progress in this line of research. Our study answers the call by [9] Ashforth et al. (2008) by developing a model that aligns these two different views of employee attachment. Specifically, we draw on the work of [43] Meyer and Herscovitch (2001) and explain why employees who use organisations to define their self-concepts will become more affectively committed to those organisations. Since forms of employee attachment will also be related to their behaviour in organisations, we also focus on [43] Meyer and Herscovitch's (2001) distinction of employees' focal and discretionary behaviour, and explain how this behaviour is associated with organisational identification and affective commitment.
The present study aims to contribute to the existing literature in two ways. First, the literature on commitment and identification has accumulated to the point where we need to know why these two constructs are related, rather than whether they are different ([9] Ashforth et al. , 2008). Although some scholars argue that the boundary between the two constructs is blurred ([48] O'Reilly and Chatman, 1986; see also the review by [52] Riketta, 2005), there is increasing evidence showing that they...