Appearance of disinterestedness is a social norm that has long been recognised by social scientists as essential to the development of social exchange relationships. Despite the predominance of social exchange theory within the field of management, management scholars have so far largely overlooked the role of this norm in their models. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how employees' attribution of disinterested organisational support (i.e. support perceived by employees as not resulting from an underlying calculation) is related to employee retention. The hypotheses were tested in a longitudinal study of 151 management-level employees. Results showed that perceptions of disinterested support decrease employee voluntary turnover through enhancing perceptions of organisational support and organisational commitment, and lessening turnover intention.
This paper introduces the construct of commitment to organizational career (COC). Conceptualized as a specific form of goal commitment, COC reflects an individual's commitment to the goal of pursuing a long and successful career in an organization. We developed a 5‐item measure of COC and examined its validity and reliability in four studies involving employees from diverse organizations and occupations (Ns = 312, 187, 199, 309). We explore COC's distinctiveness from related constructs, including organizational commitment components (i.e., affective, normative, and continuance subdimensions) and career commitment, as well as its ability to predict turnover intention and voluntary turnover. Finally, we examine COC's antecedents and specify boundary conditions to its relationship to turnover. Overall, results support the reliability and validity of the COC measure. We discuss how COC contributes to generate promising research avenues for the career and commitment literatures.
Practitioner points
We introduce the commitment to organizational career (COC) construct.
Four studies provide reliability and validity evidence for a COC measure that can be used in future research.
COC adds to the career and commitment literatures and directs attention to organizational career goals as a common ground linking individuals’ and organizations’ interests.
This common ground may provide a basis for both parties to build mutually beneficial relationships.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.