Affective, normative, and continuance commitment levels across cultures: A meta-analysis

With increasing globalization of business and diversity within the workplace, there has been growing interest in cultural differences in employee commitment. We used meta-analysis to compute mean levels of affective (AC; K = 966, N = 433,129), continuance (CC; K = 428, N = 199,831), and normative (NC; K = 336, N = 133,277) organizational commitment for as many as 54 countries and nine geographic regions, and used cultural values/practices from the Hofstede (2001), Schwartz (2006), and GLOBE (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) taxonomies to account for observed variance. We found that cultural values/practices explained the greatest amount of variance in NC, followed by AC; they did not explain variance in CC. When economic indicators were controlled, Schwartz's value orientations accounted for the most incremental variance, particularly in NC. We provide country-level normative data for the three components of commitment and discuss the implications of our findings for multi-national organizations as well as for companies employing individuals with varying cultural backgrounds.

► We conducted meta-analyses of mean organizational commitment scores. ► Means for affective, normative, and continuance commitment for up to 54 countries and 9 geographic regions are reported. ► Commitment means were correlated with culture values (e.g., individualism/collectivism, power distance) at a country level. ► Controlling for economic factors, culture values explained the most variance in normative commitment. ► Normative data for affective, normative, and continuance commitment are provided by country and geographical region.