Understanding Three Components of Organizational Commitment in Workgroups and their Relationships with Innovative Behavior

Objectives: In the age that requires much focus on the creativity and destructive innovation, team or group-based work environments are prevalent and it is increasingly important for organizations to find and nurture innovative employees who attached to the organizations. In this study, we empirically tested a causal model to foresee innovative behavior consolidating the literatures on organizational commitment and social loafing. Method: With 435 samples collected from employees currently working in various industries in Korea, an empirical test was implemented using SPSS 23 and LISREL 8.54 statistical software package. CFA, a step-wise hierarchical regression, and bootstrapping for medication effect analysis were conducted for hypothesis tests. Results: Results from SPSS and structural equation modelling (SEM) using LIREL revealed that affective commitment was significantly and negatively related to social loafing, whereas normative commitment and continuance commitment were positively related to social loafing. And social loafing had a significantly and negatively effect on innovative behavior and social loafing played a partial mediating role on the relations between the subscales of organizational commitment and innovative behavior. Conclusion: This study provides findings that those who emotionally attached to organization (affective commitment) were more likely not to be involved in social loafing behavior in workgroup settings, whereas those who have obligation to remain with the organization (normative commitment) and who were sensitive to the perceived costs associated with leaving organization (continuance commitment) were more likely to pay less efforts when working collectively than when working individually. And social loafing had a significant and negative effect on innovative behavior and played a mediating role in the relations between the three components of organizational commitment and innovative behavior. Given the findings from the current study, managers and management are recommended to pay more attentions to these differential effects of individual employees’ commitment type on workgroup and innovative behavior, and to pay further attempts finding initiatives to minimize social loafing behaviors, which in turn give adverse effects on innovative behavior.