Organizational commitment and its effects on organizational citizenship behavior in a high-unemployment environment

Organizational commitment is an important concept in management and a construct on which extensive research exists. This study considers the relationship of the three dimensions of organizational commitment (affective, normative, and continuance commitment) with employees' organizational citizenship behavior in a high-unemployment environment. By analyzing the effect of high unemployment on the displacement of the self-concept from individual toward relational and collective levels, this work predicts differences in the effect of unemployment on each of the organizational-commitment dimensions. The results show that in a high-unemployment environment the affective and normative dimensions have a similar behavior than in a full employment environment. Nevertheless, the continuance-commitment dimension increases significantly in a high-unemployment context. These results and the importance of the self-concept in organizational commitment can explain some empirical discrepancies in previous research regarding the relationships between organizational-commitment dimensions and their individual effects on employees' behavior.