Dr. Luis Arciniega
School of Business, ITAM

“Don’t mess with my company”: An exploratory study of employee commitment in Venezuela during a political-organizational conflict.

The goal of this study, conducted in a large Venezuelan organization, lies on the serendipitous opportunity that we had, to analyze employee commitment profiles before and after a series of dramatic, aggressive, and unexpected political events, directed specifically at the particular organization that we examined. Two waves of commitment data were collected, six months apart in a sample of 152 employees.

In line with the current approach of analyzing commitment, we focused our attention in the transition of commitment profiles. We found no evidence that employees’ continuance commitment for the organization was altered by the events described here. Instead, although both affective and normative commitment increased significantly during the 6 month period of the study, effects on normative were stronger.

Commitment profiles became more differentiated at wave 2. Our data hint at the possibility that feelings of moral obligation toward a company may not develop or change easily. Indeed, particularly robust drivers of normative commitment might only be those in which employees experience unusual “obligation-arousing” events. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study analyzing changes in organizational commitment across time, that appear to be under the influence of forces external to the organization.