Dual Commitment to Leader and Organization: Alternative Models Based on the Employees’ Emotional Awareness

Abstract

Management has been considering employee commitment as one of the strategic priorities, due to many studies suggesting the positive influence of commitment on high performance, innovative work behavior, employee retention, and many other important business outcomes. Nevertheless, commitment is considered an abstract construct, from which human resources management needs to create policies and practices that effectively support the business strategy and organizational culture. The existence of many foci of commitment in the workplace has been a challenge in that scenario, being important to understand how different foci relate to each other and how they influence the employee commitment process. To contribute to filling this gap, this research aims to compare two different models, analyzing the relationship between two foci of commitment, namely the affective commitment to the leader and organizational commitment. For this purpose, the employees’ emotional awareness has been considered as an independent variable. Hence, this study seeks to identify which model has higher explanatory power, and consequently, a more significant impact on the process of the employees’ commitment. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Connecting leaders and employees' affective commitment: a multilevel analysis

“…Loi et al (2012) indicated a positive influence of leaders' affective commitment on employees' affective organizational commitment, which in turn impacted both the employees' extra-role behaviors and task performance. Recently, Santana-Martins et al (2022b), in a comparative study to identify the foci (organization and leader) with higher explanatory influence on employees' commitment, concluded that affective commitment to the leader has a greater impact on employees' organizational commitment than the reverse.…”

“…This ability enhances their accurate understanding of the context and guides their behavior accordingly. Additionally, emotional awareness enables individuals to perceive and express their emotions, supporting their capacity to regulate their feelings and develop emotional maturity (Rim e, 2015;Smith et al, 2018;Santana-Martins et al, 2022b). Hence, conducting studies that investigate antecedents such as emotional maturity and different commitment foci, including commitment to leaders, career commitment, commitment to colleagues, among others, is posited as essential for a more comprehensive understanding of the employee commitment process (Klein et al, 2021;van Rossenberg et al, 2022).…”

“…Additionally, emotional awareness enables individuals to perceive and express their emotions, supporting their capacity to regulate their feelings and develop emotional maturity (Rimé, 2015; Smith et al. , 2018; Santana-Martins et al. , 2022b).…”