Ignoring commitment is costly: New approaches establish the missing link between commitment and performance

The branch network of a bank was used to investigate the link between employee commitment and organizational performance in terms of sales targets met and change in profits. Commitment was measured by the conventional Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) and different variations of a specifically designed new commitment scale. The approach taken involved the application of multiple regression analysis. That way a variety of factors assumed to contribute to performance, apart from commitment, could be included in the model and held constant. It emerged that employee commitment is significantly related to the financial success of bank branches. The results varied depending on how commitment and performance were measured. Supervisory commitment appears to have a particularly strong impact on the outcome indicators.