Studying Organizational Commitment with the OCQ in the Korean Retail Context: Its Dimensionality and Relationships with Satisfaction and Work Outcomes

A two-stage approach was adopted to study organizational commitment among Korean retail employees. First, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the dimensionality and psychometric properties of organizational commitment as measured by the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ). Two dimensions-affective and continuance-were identified. On that basis, this study empirically tested a model on the relationships among two facets of commitment, three facets of job satisfaction (pay, co-worker, and supervisor), and two work outcomes (effort and propensity-to-leave). The model testing results showed that in the Korean retail setting: (1) satisfaction with pay and satisfaction with supervisor significantly increase both affective commitment and continuance commitment; (2) satisfaction with co-workers positively influences affective commitment but has no significant effect on continuance commitment; and (3) affective commitment increases job effort but decreases the employees' propensity to leave the firm, while continuance commitment reduces propensity to leave but does not increase job effort.