Engaged and committed? The relationship between work engagement and commitment in professional service firms

Abstract

Our study explores the relationship between employee engagement and foci-commitment of employees in professional service firms (PSFs). PSFs compete on the basis of their ability to encourage their employees to generate exceptional knowledge-based services and products, acting within and beyond the organizational boundaries. In order to achieve these outputs, the PSFs need to ensure that their professionals are engaged and committed. Drawing on 375 surveys from the employees of a global PSF, we compare two models to test the relationship between work engagement and multi-foci commitment: the organization, the client, the team and the profession. We first explore an overall positive effect of work engagement on commitment to all four foci. We then compare the overall impact to the independent effects of work engagement dimensions on four commitment foci. Our findings suggest that work engagement with three dimensions is a better-fitting model in the PSFs context.

Keywords::

• client commitment
• organizational commitment
• profession commitment
• professional service firms
• team commitment
• work engagement

Notes

^1. All affective commitment items (6 × 4 foci = 24 items) are included in the CFA. CFA allows for correlation between the similar-worded items. Item-level intercorrelations are available from the authors upon request.