Shouksmith's (1994) finding that promotional opportunities are an important predictor of continuance commitment. The fact that professional ability development was related to affective commitment but not to continuance or normative commitment suggests that the development of employees' professional abilities may help them identify with the goals and values of the organization, thus building affective commitment. However, employees may see these abilities as transferrable and the organization's willingness to develop them as a normal business activity, which explains the lack of a connection between professional ability development and continuance and normative commitment, respectively. A significant finding in this study is the fact that organizations need to do more than simply develop their human resources through providing jobs and experiences that allow employees to accomplish their career goals and develop their professional abilities. While doing so will enhance affective commitment and to a lesser degree continuance and normative commitment, organizations that are also able to follow-up and develop reward structures that reinforce these activities are able to leverage all three forms of commitment. The lack of a significant number of interaction effects among the various factors of career growth suggests that career growth progress, professional ability development, promotion speed, and remuneration growth have separate, additive effects on organizational commitment rather than multiplicative effects. More practically speaking, each of these career growth factors plays an important and unique role in enhancing organizational commitment. Finally, it is also interesting to note that, while perceived opportunities were a significant predictor of both affective and normative commitment, its effect was negated by the presence of career growth factors. This suggests that, in China at least, what an organization does for its employees in terms of career growth is independent of the marketplace.
Managerial implications
Meyer and Allen (1997) suggested that HR practices could be used to manage commitment. While they identified promotion and compensation as key factors in securing organizational commitment, they focused more on recruitment, socialization, assessment, and benefits practices as promising vehicles for building commitment among employees. Our study suggests that career growth is a viable subset of practices that should be considered by managers seeking to build a committed workforce. It may be particularly useful in that many commitment enhancing strategies have been directed toward newcomers rather than longer- term employees. Career growth may be a very viable way for managers to maintain or perhaps re-establish organizational commitment after difficult periods in an organization's history (e.g., layoffs, restructuring). Because career goal progress is linked to all three forms of commitment, managers would be advised to consider employee career goals during the recruitment, selection and placement processes. Doing so would enable them to place a candidate into the position that best fits into his/her career goals. Conversely, should any employees not have clearly developed career goals, helping them develop one could pay dividends later on. Moreover developing employee professional skills and abilities is vital not simply to promote affective commitment but to meeting the needs of the employee and organization alike. This study also suggests that employers, who back up their HR practices with a reward system that recognizes the worth and contribution of employees to the organization, build additional commitment from their employees. Employees who are reinforced through promotions and pay raises identify more with their employers' goals, find it harder to leave their organizations and develop a moral bond with their employers.
Limitations and future research
As is common in survey research, data are cross-sectional and self-report (i.e., subject to common method error variance). Common method bias can work in either direction, however. That is, it can either attenuate or inflate correlations among variables, so one should not automatically assume inflated relationships (Spector, 2006). In addition, Meyer and Allen's (1997) continuance commitment scale has two items (“One of the few negative consequences of leaving this organization would be the scarcity of available alternatives.”“I believe I have too few options to consider leaving this organization.”) that overlap with the concept of perceived opportunities. This was mitigated somewhat in this study by positioning the six continuance commitment items together and asking subjects to think about these items in terms of their cost of leaving the organization. Priming respondents to think in terms of the cost of leaving rather than perceived alternatives resulted in the two measures being uncorrelated with one another (r=.01). An additional limitation involves the nature of the sample. These data come solely from the large, developed cities of China, so there is no guarantee that these results are generalizable to other regions within or outside of China. Finally, there is no guaranty that the four factors utilized in this study to capture career growth are all-inclusive measures of this concept. Future research should focus on the further articulation of this concept and its measurement. With so little research on the relationship between career growth and organizational commitment, this area is ripe for future research. Among potential topics is the notion of how career growth interacts with other determinants of organizational commitment, such as person–job fit, job design, leadership style, etc., and the role played by individual differences in the career growth—organizational commitment relationship. Moreover, of interest is whether career growth predicts other outcomes directly, such as organizational citizenship behaviors, turnover intentions, and performance. This study demonstrates that the three component model of commitment is not a uniquely American phenomenon and supports the work of Chay and Aryee (1999) and Aryee and Chen (2004) showing the importance of career growth in a collectivistic culture. However, it begs the questions of what other factors, particularly those related to cultural differences, moderate the relationship between career growth and organizational commitment.For example,in China commitment to family is