Critical Evaluation of Porter et al.'s Organizational Commitment Questionnaire: Implications for Researchers.

Organizational commitment emerged in the 1970's and 1980's as a key factor of the relationship between individuals and organizations (Mowday et al. 1982). Specialists in the field of organizational commitment agree that two complementary dimensions comprise the construct: the affective dimension

and the calculative or cognitive dimension (Allen and Meyer 1984; Morrow 1993). The affective dimension is the better known of the two. Mowday et al. (1979, 1982) characterized affective commitment in their definition of organizational commitment as entailing "a strong belief in and acceptance of the organization's goals and values, a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization, and a strong desire to maintain membership in the organization" (Mowday et al. 1982, p. 27). The calculative dimension is based on the concept of exchange between the individual and the organization (March and Simon 1958), as well as on the notion of investments and side bets discussed by Becker (1960). Calculative commitment is the outcome of an individual's decision to remain with an organization because of the personal time and resources already devoted to the company and because of the financial costs of changing jobs. A third dimension, normative commitment, has also been proposed but is largely unsupported (Morrow 1993).

Interest in commitment as an explanation for behaviors such as employee performance and job satisfaction (Cohen and Hucedek 1993; Mathieu and Zajac 1990) led to the development of several ways of measuring the construct (Allen et al. 1990; Alutto 1972; Cook and Wall 1980; Hrebiniak and Porter et al. 1974; Meyer et al. 1993, 1984; O'Reilly and Chatman 1986; Penley and Gould 1988; Wiener 1982). This state of affairs hinders analysts' ability to compare results across studies. The difficulty arises not only from the properties of the measures used to operationalize commitment, but also from the assumptions that underlie the measures. Does the measure tap affective commitment, calculative commitment, and/or normative commitment?

Having been used to measure commitment in many sales force studies, the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (hereafter, "OCQ") is a viable target for testing the construct's stability and factor structure. Evidence from the organizational behavior literature suggests that the OCQ has two dimensions, yet the majority of the sales force studies have treated the construct as unidimensional (Babakus et al. 1996; Boshoff and Mels 1995; Bret et al. 1995; Brown et al. 1993; Grant and Gravens 1996; Michaels and Dixon 1994; Sager 1991, 1989; Siguaw and Honeycutt 1995; Siguaw et al. 1994; Singh et al. 1996; Tyagi and Wotruba 1993). The present study evaluates the dimensionality of the OCQ in hopes of determining the most effective way of measuring the construct.