Linking organizational support to employee commitment: evidence from hotel industry of China

Abstract

Employee commitment is an important issue for both practitioners and academicians. Although antecedents of employee commitment have been examined in previous literature, organizational support, which is an important organizational characteristic to be developed by managers, and its relationship with employee commitment have not attracted enough academic attention nowadays. Meanwhile, enough empirical evidence of relationship between various dimensions of employee commitment, such as affective and normative commitments is not there. This article focuses on exploring the relationships among organizational support, affective commitment, and normative commitment, based on the data from the hotel industry of China. The results indicate that affective commitment has significant positive effect on normative commitment. Among the three dimensions of organizational support, i.e. managerial support, coworker relationship, and role ambiguity, managerial support has the greatest influence on employee commitment. Theoretical discussions and practical implications have also been provided.

Keywords:

• affective commitment
• coworker relationship
• managerial support
• normative commitment
• role ambiguity

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewer and editor for their insightful advice on our revision. This research is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation in China (no. 70702011).