Commitment to change and turnover: A test of the three-component model

As organizational changes have become the rule rather than the exception in most workplaces, understanding how employees perceive and react to these changes is increasingly important. Based on Meyer and Herscovitch’s (2001) general model of commitment, Herscovitch and Meyer (2002) proposed a model of commitment to change including affective, normative, and continuance commitment components. However, while the model of organizational commitment has since been refined, leading to the widespread adoption of two subcomponents in the conceptualization of the continuance commitment component, such specification has yet to be applied to the model of commitment to change. The present study extends previous research using the three-component model to change in two important ways. First, we proposed a revised version of the measure of the three-component model of commitment to change that included subcomponents of perceived sacrifice and few alternatives within continuance commitment, similarly as they were developed for the measure of organizational commitment. Second, our study examined how the components of commitment to change predicted employee voluntary turnover, a behavior that falls outside of the range of focal behaviors (e.g., cooperation and active support for change) associated with commitment to change. In doing so, we included the components of organizational commitment, for which turnover (vs. retention) is considered as a focal behavior. We hypothesized that, in the context of organizational change, the affective, normative, and perceived sacrifice components of organizational commitment would be associated with reduced employee turnover likelihood while the affective and normative components of commitment to change would raise the likelihood of turnover. Using a sample of 602 employees belonging to organizations undergoing a major change, we found support for a model of commitment to change including four components: affective, normative, perceived sacrifice, and few alternatives commitments. Further, the components of commitment to organization and change were used as predictors of voluntary employee turnover as obtained 6 to 8 months later in a subsample of 235 of these employees. Normative organizational commitment was found to predict reduced turnover while affective and normative commitment to change were related to increased turnover. Controlling for the effects of organizational commitment, our findings thus indicate that commitment to change may enhance employee turnover, thereby having negative implications for the success of organizational change. The implications of these findings for research on commitment to change are discussed.