Antecedents and Consequents of Loyalty to a Religious Organization

ABSTRACT

The objective of the study is to identify antecedent and consequent factors of loyalty to a religious organization. The study is based on the theory of planned behavior, which is designed to identify which variables antecede the individual’s behavior of being loyal to a religious organization and have the constructs intrapersonal religious commitment and interpersonal religious commitment as constructs that are consequent of an individual’s behavior of being loyal to religious organizations. A theoretical model is proposed with the constructs attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, intention, loyalty to a religious organization and interpersonal and intrapersonal religious commitment. Therefore, a quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional study with 364 respondents was conducted. The study shows that a positive behavioral evaluation, opportunities in performing behavior and intention tend to be factors that influence loyalty behavior; additionally, once loyal, there is a greater likelihood of the individual being committed to his/her beliefs and the practice of those beliefs. Thus, attitude and subjective norms potentially influence commitment to a creed.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious organization
• loyalty
• theory of planned behavior
• religious commitment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq/Brazil), project 304209/2018-0, by Fundação Estadual de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Espírito Santo (FAPES/Brazil), projects 84513772 (599/2018) and 85395650 (228/2019), by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT/Portugal) through NECE (Núcleo de Estudos em Ciências Empresariais), project UID/GES/04630/2019, and by IFTS (Instituto Fucape de Tecnologias Sociais), project 2018-2021.