The mediating effects of professional and organizational commitment on the relationship between HRM practices and professional employees’ intention to stay

Abstract

Previous literature on professional employees argues that the quality of their work depends on both their organizational and professional commitment. Combining a target similarity and a cognitive approach to HRM, this study examines the mediating effects of these two variables on the relationship between HRM practices and intention to stay. Using a sample of 265 professional auditors working for certified public accountancy firms, we find that organizational commitment mediates the relationship between information-sharing, fair rewards and intention to stay, while the effect of autonomy and recognition is successively mediated by professional commitment and organizational commitment. Training has a direct effect on intention to stay. The implications of these results for the development of an HRM model linking professional employees’ organizational and professional commitment, thereby providing the possibility of reconciling organizational efficiency and traditional professional ethics, are discussed.

Keywords:

• Professional employees
• HRM practices
• professional commitment
• organizational commitment
• intention to stay

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jill Bennoson for the linguistic revision of this paper and her helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 In the case of missing data only, when one answer was missing and a minimum of two other answers relating to the same construct were available, we used the mean of the other answers available. When more than one answer was missing, we simply discarded the questionnaire. Eighteen questionnaires were discarded for this reason.

2 Pare and Tremblay (2007) comprised 28 items. We removed 3 out of their 9 items regarding information-sharing and 1 regarding fair rewards because they did not apply to the context of the study. 4 items were removed from the analyses because of poor loading on their related construct: 1 for information-sharing; 1 for training and 2 for recognition.

3 The score is situated slightly under the .70 threshold. The weakness of this alpha will be addressed when discussing the limits of our study.

4 While their results failed to do so.