Profiles of commitment in standard and fixed-term employment arrangements: Implications for work outcomes

This paper develops and tests a framework for understanding the relative importance and predictive efficacy of commitment to one’s profession, organization, supervisor and job in both standard and fixed-term employment arrangements. Drawing from the commitment and employment arrangement literatures, we test a set of hypotheses identifying distinct patterns of commitments (i.e., commitment profiles) to these four targets that should yield desired work-related outcomes in standard and fixed-term employment arrangements. We test our hypotheses using latent profile analysis on data collected from two Finnish universities (N1 = 235, N2 = 233). A high macro profile, characterized by high commitment to profession, organization and job, and moderate commitment to supervisor, emerged for employees in standard employment relationships, and this profile was associated with significantly higher positive work behaviours and work effort and lower turnover intentions than the other profiles. For employees with fixed-term employment contracts, a high cosmopolitan profile emerged, characterized by high commitment to the profession and job and low commitment to the organization and supervisor. For these employees, this profile was associated with positive work behaviours and work effort comparable to the high macro profile. Implications for theory, research and practice are discussed.