Proactive and politically skilled professionals: What is the relationship with affective occupational commitment?

The aim of this study is to extend research on employee affective commitment in three ways: (1) instead of organizational commitment the focus is on occupational commitment; (2) the role of proactive personality on affective occupational commitment is examined; and (3) occupational satisfaction is examined as a mediator and political skills as moderator in the relationship between proactive personality and affective occupational commitment. Two connected studies, one in a hospital located in the private sector and one in a university located in the public sector, are carried out in Pakistan, drawing on a total sample of over 400 employees. The results show that proactive personality is positively related to affective occupational commitment, and that occupational satisfaction partly mediates the relationship between proactive personality and affective occupational commitment. No effect is found for a moderator effect of political skills in the relationship between proactive personality and affective occupational commitment. Political skills however moderate the relationship between proactive personality and affective organizational commitment

Opinion transmission in organizations: an agent-based modeling approach

This paper builds a theoretical framework to detect the conditions under which social influence enables persistence of a shared opinion among members of an organization over time, despite membership turnover. It develops agent-based simulations of opinion evolution in an advice network, whereby opinion is defined in the broad sense of shared understandings on a matter that is relevant for an organization’s activities, and on which members have some degree of discretion. We combine a micro-level model of social influence that builds on the “relative agreement” approach of Deffuant et al. (J. Artif. Soc. Simul. 5:4, 2002), and a macro-level structure of interactions that includes a flow of joiners and leavers and allows for criteria of advice tie formation derived from, and grounded in, the empirical literature on intra-organizational networks. We provide computational evidence that persistence of opinions over time is possible in an organization with joiners and leavers, a result that depends on circumstances defined by mode of network tie formation (in particular, criteria for selection of advisors), individual attributes of agents (openness of newcomers to influence, as part of their socialization process), and time-related factors (turnover rate, which regulates the flow of entry and exit in the organization, and establishes a form of endogenous hierarchy based on length of stay). We explore the combined effects of these factors and discuss their implications

Do cultural values influence commitment to company and union? A study of Chinese manufacturing workers.

This paper examines the association between individual-level cultural values and employees' commitment to, and citizenship behaviors towards, their employing organization and union. Based on a study of Chinese manufacturing workers, several significant findings emerged, most notably that workers distinguished clearly between the organization and union as foci for commitment and that horizontal, but not vertical, collectivism was positively associated with union commitment and union citizenship behavior. Our results suggest the need to differentiate between horizontal and vertical collectivism when considering the effects of cultural values on attitudes towards unions and collective action.Department of Management and Marketin