Organizational commitment

Organizational commitment in the fields of Organizational Behavior and Industrial/Organizational Psychology is, in a general sense, the employee's psychological attachment to the organization. It can be contrasted with other work-related attitudes, such as Job Satisfaction, defined as an employee's feelings about their job, and Organizational Identification, defined as the degree to which an employee experiences a 'sense of oneness' with their organization.

Beyond this general sense, Organizational scientists have developed many nuanced definitions of organizational commitment, and numerous scales to measure them. Exemplary of this work is Meyer & Allen's model of commitment, which was developed to integrate numerous definitions of commitment that had proliferated in the literature.

The individual commits to and remains with an organization because of feelings of obligation. These feelings may derive from many sources. For example, the organization may have invested resources in training an employee who then feels a 'moral' obligation to put forth effort on the job and stay with the organization to 'repay the debt.'

It may also reflect an internalized norm, developed before the person joins the organization through family or other socialization processes, that one should be loyal to one's organization.