Profiles of commitment in standard and fixed-term employment arrangements: Implications for work outcomes

Abstract

This paper develops and tests a framework for understanding the relative importance and predictive efficacy of commitment to one’s profession, organization, supervisor and job in both standard and fixed-term employment arrangements. Drawing from the commitment and employment arrangement literatures, we test a set of hypotheses identifying distinct patterns of commitments (i.e., commitment profiles) to these four targets that should yield desired work-related outcomes in standard and fixed-term employment arrangements. We test our hypotheses using latent profile analysis on data collected from two Finnish universities (N1 = 235, N2 = 233). A high macro profile, characterized by high commitment to profession, organization and job, and moderate commitment to supervisor, emerged for employees in standard employment relationships, and this profile was associated with significantly higher positive work behaviours and work effort and lower turnover intentions than the other profiles. For employees with fixed-term employment contracts, a high cosmopolitan profile emerged, characterized by high commitment to the profession and job and low commitment to the organization and supervisor. For these employees, this profile was associated with positive work behaviours and work effort comparable to the high macro profile. Implications for theory, research and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• Commitment
• profile of commitment
• fixed-term employment arrangement
• latent profile analysis

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Education in Finland for providing funding for the data collection as well as the universities that participated in the project.

Notes

1. We propose a set of specific a priori hypotheses to test given our expectation that certain profiles will emerge based on prior profile research on commitment to different targets and the differences between standard and fixed-term employees. In doing so, we do not formulate formal hypotheses for all profiles found in prior work that did not include fixed-term workers (e.g., Becker & Billings, 1993; Swailes, 2004) but rather focus on those profiles that are most relevant to standard and fixed-term employment relationships (e.g., “committed” and “cosmopolitan commitment” profiles).

2. Finnish universities use fixed-term contracts more commonly than other Finnish organizations. In 2011, 82.5% of all work contracts in Finland were standard and 17.5% were fixed-term (Statistics Finland).