Organizational Commitment in Time of War: Assessing the Impact and Attenuation of Employee Sensitivity to Ethnopolitical Conflict

We examine organizational commitment in foreign-invested and indigenous firms located in an operating environment characterized by ethnopolitical conflict and its violent manifestations of civil war and terrorism. Drawing on the management, psychology, and political science literature streams, we investigate whether employee sensitivity to ethnopolitical conflict contributes to explaining organizational commitment in a violent operating environment. The results of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that employee sensitivity to ethnopolitical conflict is inversely related to organizational commitment and has explanatory power beyond the traditional predictors of organizational commitment. Further, perceived organizational support is found to attenuate the negative relationship between employee sensitivity to ethnopolitical conflict and organizational commitment in foreign-invested firms but not in indigenous firms. The data suggest that an operating environment beset with violent ethnopolitical conflict may exact an indirect cost on the firm through lowered employee commitment, and that foreign-invested firms through a ‘foreignness advantage’ can manage this potential cost by maintaining a high level of perceived organizational support among their employees. Implications for research and practice are discussed.