Systematic Review of Empirical and Psychometric Studies on Organizational Commitment Conducted in Turkey

Abstract

Although it is far from a consensus, organizational commitment is considered to be a multi-component construct by many researchers of the subject area. Several different multi-component conceptualizations are proposed in the literature, but the most widely preferred model (therefore, the most frequently applied "non-unidimensional" scale) in empirical studies is that of Allen and Meyer (1990). In their model, Allen and Meyer theorize 3 related but different components of organizational commitment, namely Affective, Continuance and Normative Commitment components. They stated that they specifically refer to them as components, i.e. not as types or factors, because an employee's relationship with an organization might reflect varying degrees of all three (Meyer & Allen, 1997). In other words, in this model (and in the most of the other multi-component models as well) the term organizational commitment is not considered to be a construct per se, but just the group name of these three constructs. Notwithstanding this, a casual perusal of the international journals reveals that this fact has, albeit exceptionally, eluded a few researchers who either (i) computed a "total organizational commitment score" besides the three composite scores or (ii) performed a second-order factor analysis of the three components, both of which are clear signs of a practice that is not in compliance with the model. Contrary to the international literature, papers with these kinds of unfortunate oversights are quite common in the scientific journals in Turkey, let alone being exceptional. It prompted us to turn this casual observation into a systematic review and to conduct an exhaustive survey of the empirical organizational commitment studies carried out in Turkey, in order to assess the pervasiveness of the aforementioned poor practices. Besides our initial motivation, we would like to provide a comprehensive systematic review of the organizational commitment research. Within this framework, we surveyed the empirical studies on organizational commitment conducted in Turkey since 1998 and identified and thoroughly examined (i) 69 articles from twelve social science journals (ii) 75 papers from the proceedings of the four of the most prominent national conferences on the related areas and (ii) 55 doctoral dissertations which have organizational commitment as one of the variables. We provided summarized information regarding the variables of the studies, the measurement instruments used to assess organizational commitment, and the statistical methods utilized for data analysis, and several other methodological properties of these studies that are included in this review.