Culture, job satisfaction and organizational commitment in India and the United States

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the roles of culture and job satisfaction as antecedents to organizational commitment in both a Western context (the US) and in India. Design/methodology/approach - Responses come from a questionnaire distributed to engineers in India. Construct equivalence of measures is established, while hierarchical regression analysis is used to assess the extent to which each hypothesized antecedent is related to affective, continuance, and normative commitment. Responses from each national context are compared and contrasted. Findings - Job satisfaction is found to relate to affective commitment in both the Indian and American samples. Moderate support is found for the hypothesized effect of collectivism on normative commitment in both samples, while the hypothesized antecedents to continuance commitment are not found in any sample. Different patterns of relationships emerge in the US and India. Research limitations/implications - The results provide further cautionary evidence against uncritically applying organizational theories developed in a Western context to developing nations such as India. The sample in this research is restricted to engineers, future research should examine other occupations/professions as well as determining the applicability of these results to different levels in the organization. Originality/value - This research examines theoretically suggested antecedents to organizational commitment, explicitly testing these relationships in two cultural contexts. The results presented in this paper suggest that context must be taken into account when developing organizational theories. Further, the results suggest specific activities that can be useful in the Indian context to increase both normative and affective commitment.