Career-oriented versus team-oriented commitment and behavior at work

TLDR: In this article, a measure to distinguish career-oriented from team-oriented work commitment was developed and validated, and the distinction between careeroriented and teamoriented commitment was then cross-validated in a 2nd study, among employees of a financial service organization in Belgium (TV = 287), in which the constructs proved to be not only differentially related to self-reported behavior at work, but also predictive of performance ratings by superiors.

Abstract: Among a representative sample of the Dutch population (Study 1: N = 690), careeroriented and team-oriented commitment were assessed, in addition to affective organizational commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991). Confirmatory factor analysis supported the proposed distinction between the 2 specific forms of commitment at the measurement level. Furthermore, the construct validity of team-oriented and career-oriented commitment as well as their differential implications were corroborated by self-reports of workrelated behavior 1 year later. The distinction between career-oriented and team-oriented commitment was then cross-validated in a 2nd study, among employees of a financial service organization in Belgium (TV = 287), in which the constructs proved to be not only differentially related to self-reported behavior at work, but also predictive of performance ratings by superiors. The aim of the present study was to develop and validate a measure to distinguish career-oriented from teamoriented work commitment. We intended to examine whether these specific forms of commitment could be distinguished from each other at the measurement level and to investigate whether they were differentially related to self-reported as well as externally assessed indexes of work-related behavior. We first present results from a representative sample of the Dutch working population, relating measures of commitment taken at Time 1 to selfreported behavior at Time 2 (Study 1). Subsequently, we cross-validated and extended our findings by examining whether similar results would be obtained when self-reported commitment scores were related to external assessments of performance, with an independent sample consisting of employees of a financial service organization in Belgium (Study 2). In organizational theory and research, attempts to predict the behavior of individual workers in organizations have focused on organizational commitment as a crucial