Twenty-first International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

A reservoir of empirical research has been conducted for a long years in an effort to discover the antecedents of organizational commitment. However little works have been embarked to establish the causal relationships among antecedents especially in the context of Middle Eastern countries. A sample of 234 public sector employees were selected from two Saudi government organizations. The main purpose of this study is to examine the causal relationships of organizational practices with trust and role ambiguity in influencing organizational commitment composed of the three dimensions i.e affective, continuance, and normative commitments as developed by Meyer and Allen. This study also examines the effect of organizational commitment on altruism. Results of Linear Structural Relations (LISREL) analyses show that human resource-oriented practices, such as career development and training, are more directly related to affective and normative commitment, while organizational process-oriented practices, such as communication and participation in decision-making, are indirectly related to them through role ambiguity and trust. However, no hypothesized antecedent was found to affect significantly continuance commitment. As an outcome of organizational commitment, altruism was predicted by affective commitment, and role ambiguity. These findings shed some light on the importance of understanding the nature of organizational commitment in the public sector and contributed to the scant literature about this topic in the context of Saudi Arabia.