Task: Undertake a Literature Review (max 1000 words) on 'Strategies for Building Organisational Commitment'. The review is to focus solely on refereed academic publications (i.e. journal articles). 

Purpose: As students of Organisational Behaviour it is important that you are able to effectively identify, collate and disseminate credible information on a range of issues that have strong theoretical and/or practical relevance to the field. Such information will often provide the basis for effective planning and decision-making. 

The psychological attachment that an employee has with his organization by means of his duties and responsibilities is referred to as organizational commitment (John P. Meyer 2001). Organizational commitment still has unexplored areas that boil down in an organizational scenario when it comes to deciding upon strategies for organizational commitment. An analysis of the history, in its very initial stage, has brought out the disparity in the thought of critics even when formulating the definition of organizational commitment (Sayani Ghosh 2014). This can well bring out the fact that formulating and identifying the right set of theories for an organization would be a bigger challenge. The literature review being conducted here would try to bring out the best strategically identified theories based on situational parities to build organizational commitment which is a must for an organization to retain employees and manage costs related to new hiring, training as well as managing service level.

The development of the concept

The basis of the inception of the concept of organizational commitment, as it is known today, was in the idea of devising strategies or understanding how employees could be held back in a job and whether they were happy with it or dissatisfied and the causes. Such an idea also brought out dependable variables including job-based performance, employee turnover and organizational citizenship behaviour. Along with the cause based variables were also identified including job pay; job stress, job insecurity; leader and manager based relationship as well as long term benefits (Furåker, Håkansson & Karlsson 2011).

The same topics, as mentioned above, have been studied under various titles and situations over a period of time. The concept initiated in the study of Becker (1960) as discussed as a function to identify reasons to retain employees and remove dissatisfaction, was extended by Meyer and Allen (1999) in which a three-component model including Affective commitment, Continuance Commitment and Normative Commitment was established that was synced and analysed on the basis of three different psychological states in humans. Before this study, the major concept had a vague and complicated lookout and quantifying results was difficult, though the model was devised as an extension to the research but could not be validated for long when analysing organizational commitment with just the three identified mindsets. Also, the model was considered to be limited to analysing turnover aspects of the organization. In spite of the criticisms, the model received high appraise till the time the five component model was devised with the two new components including habitual commitment and forced commitment (Keiningham et al. 2015). It was with this model that critics believed that a parochial approach beyond turnover in regards to organizational commitment can be considered. Also, with the model coming into implementation after publication in 1993, business entrepreneurs, as well as employers, started to analyse its application to a job setting and various insights were taken up as threads for future research in this regard. The model also with a diverse application brought out the understanding of analysing employee attitudes. The model-based application was now combined with concepts of emotional intelligence and transactional analysis for measuring employee attitudes. This was the first time the quantitative results were devised in this regard (Nordin 2011). After this first initiative of quantitative result based researches being carried out in the area, the concept of organizational commitment saw a different consideration. The concept gained prominence with more and more researches being carried out and organization as well as employee based factors being measured against it. Though at one point critics considered it to be running on a hit and trial method and the concept is just tested upon the by Somers under the dimensions of job search behaviour, absenteeism, job stress and turnover the concept received empirical subdivisions identified for categorising employees under different heads majorly highly committed employees, affective-normative set, continuance –normative, continuance dominant and uncommitted (Sayani Ghosh 2014). The model was so devised that more than one factor could be combined for analysis at the same time.

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