Increasing Affective Organizational Commitment in Public Organizations

Abstract

Affective organizational commitment has been equated to the public service motivation of pubhc employees It is a valuable component of organizational effectiveness However, few management intervention strategies exist that specifically address increasing affective commitment Often successful interventions are designed around correlates of the intended attitudinal construct One hypothesized correlate of affective commitment m organization behavior hterature is trust Trust can be differentiated as interpersonal trust (between the employee and the manager) and systems trust (between the employee and the organization as a whole) This differentiation is significant for the public manager because the relationship between affective commitment and trust can prescnbe two different strategies for an intervention aimed at positively impacting affective commitment For example, if affective commitment is linked to systems trust, an intervention based on a top-down strategy would be the better choice This study tests the relationship of affective commitment and trust m over 600 employees m three different public orgamzations The study finds that interpersonal trust is the significantly stronger correlate of affective commitment These findings suggest that intervention strategies that begin with trust building from the bottom-up are likely to have a higher likelihood of increasing affective organizational commitment than strategies reflecting a systems trust building objective