Content area
Full Text
Affective organizational commitment of salespeople has been widely recognized as being influenced by task-, role-, supervisory behavior-, and organizational structure-related factors. While previous empirical studies have examined the effect of one or more of these factors, this study provides a simultaneous test of the importance of these factors for a salesperson's affective organizational commitment. The model formulated in this study also decomposes the importance of each factor into direct and indirect (through role stress factors) influences that the factors have on affective organizational commitment. The results provide useful and interesting implications for enhancing affective organizational commitment of
INTRODUCTION
Researchers have long been interested in the study of organizational commitment of salespeople (Chonko 1986; Hunt, Chonko, and Wood 1985; Michaels, Cron, Dubinsky, and Joachimsthaler 1988; Ingram, Lee, and Skinner 1989; Johnston, Parasuraman, Futrell, and Black 1990) primarily because committed employees stay longer than those that are uncommitted (Johnston et al. 1990). Although the scholarly literature is replete with diverse definitions of organizational commitment (Reichers 1986), two views of commitment have dominated the literature. The first sees commitment as a state of attachment that reflects the strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization. The second sees commitment as a state of attachment that reflects a lack of alternate employment opportunity and/or high personal sacrifice associated with leaving a particular organization. These two types of attachments have been termed as affective and continuance organizational commitment, respectively (McGee and Ford 1987). While both of these dimensions are important and useful, this study focuses on the affective organizational commitment of salespeople.
Studies in the salesforce literature have attempted to identify various organizational factors that enhance affective commitment of salespeople. The antecedents identified have included task characteristics (Hunt et al. 1985), supervisory behaviors (Johnston et al. 1990), and organizational structure (Michaels et al. 1988). Although a great deal has been learned about the relevance of these antecedent factors, a number of research issues remain to be addressed.
First, there is no single study in the salesforce literature that has simultaneously included organizational factors from each of the above domains and built a multivariate predictive model of affective commitment of salespeople. Simultaneous inclusion of antecedent variables provides information on their relative utility, which may be especially...