DUAL COMMITMENT - UNIQUE CONSTRUCT OR EPIPHENOMENON

Research on dual commitment has been criticized for failing to establish that dual commitment is a unique construct with significant explanatory power beyond that of employer commitment and union commitment. Using data for a sample of shop stewards, this analysis shows that dual commitment does have unique predictive power for steward grievance processing behaviors and grievance procedure outcomes. Consequently, models relating employer commitment (in unionized settings) or union commitment to behaviors or outcomes will be misspecified if they do not include dual commitment as a unique construct, and statistical estimates of these models will be subject to specification bias.