Person-centered approach vs. Variable-centered approach in determining relationship between organizational commitment and work-family conflict

Abstract

For more than a decade researchers have explored organizational commitment and tried to determine its influence on work behaviour based using a person-centered approach instead of variable-centered approach (Meyer & Hercovitch, 2001; Meyer et al., 2012). Most studies investigating relations between commitment and work-family conflict apply a variable-centered approach and emphasize negative relationships between these two variables (Casper et al., 2011; Namasivayam & Zhao, 2007). As organizational commitment is a comprehensive psychological state characterized by different levels on all components (affective, normative and continuance) of commitment, the usage of profiles of different components of commitment may assist in determining the relationships between commitment and work - family conflict. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare person-centered and variable-centered approaches investigating relationships between organizational commitment and work-family conflict. A cross-sectional survey was employed to gather data from 1,098 employees (747 women and 361 men) from different organizations in Lithuania using the Organizational commitment questionnaire (Meyer, Allen, 2004) and Work-family conflict scale (Carlson et al., 2000). Correlational analysis showed that all three components of commitment were negatively related to different forms of work-family conflict on various levels. K-means clustering analysis was used to identify four commitment profiles (fully committed, affective-dominant, continuance-dominant and uncommitted). Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANOVA) revealed statistically significant differences between four clusters (profiles) of commitment with regard to work-family conflict. [...]