ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT - EVIDENCE OF CAREER STAGE EFFECTS

Research examining work attitudes from a career stage perspective addresses two issues: changes in attitudes across stages and the relations between work experiences and attitudes at different stages. Unfortunately, employee age, organizational tenure, and positional tenure are all used to define career stages, making cross-study comparisons difficult. In this study, affective, continuance, and normative commitment to the organization were examined as a function of all three career stage variables. Also examined were the contributions, across stages, of various work experiences to the prediction of affective commitment. Results indicate that although affective and normative commitment increase significantly with employee age, increases in continuance commitment are more closely related to increases in organizational and positional tenure. Further, the relationships between work experiences and affective commitment differ only slightly across tenure levels, and not at all across employee age groups.