Difference Between Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment

The key difference between job involvement and organizational commitment is that job involvement focuses on an individual’s emotions towards his profession, whereas organizational commitment focuses on the relationship between an individual and an organization.

Organizational commitment and job involvement are closely-related HR principles. Basically, these two concepts are crucial in employee motivation and employee retention in an organization.

CONTENTS

1. Overview and Key Difference
2. What is Job Involvement
3. What is Organizational Commitment
4. Relationship Between Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment
5. Side by Side Comparison – Job Involvement vs Organizational Commitment in Tabular Form
6. Summary

What is Job Involvement?

Job involvement refers to the psychological and emotional extent to which an individual is involved in his profession. As per organizational context, job involvement is considered as the main way to unleash the potential of employees and unlock employee motivation while enhancing productivity. From an individual viewpoint, job involvement includes motivation, performance, career growth, and satisfaction in their profession. Motivated employees will definitely contribute to higher job involvement. This will lead to organizational effectiveness and productivity. Employees become involved in their careers when they recognize in them the potential for satisfying outstanding psychological needs such as career growth, achievement, recognition and job security.

Job involvement will not depend on demographics such as age, gender, education and work experience, but it may depend on personality traits. For instance, intrinsically motivated employees having self-esteem may show higher job involvement. Moreover, employees involved in their job may interact with supervisors in a positive manner and involve in meeting performance standards or organizational goals. Furthermore, such employees are strongly committed, dedicated to work and intrinsically satisfied. In addition, they are more inclined towards career advancement than other subordinates.

What is Organizational Commitment?

Organizational commitment refers to the attachment between an employee and an organization in terms of the psychological point of view of the employee. In short, it is the bond employees experience towards the organization. Organizational commitment determines the retention of employees within the company and passion of employee to accomplish targets of the organization. The level of employee satisfaction, employee engagement, leadership performance and job security can be predicted by organizational commitment.

Three-Component Model (TCM) is a distinguished theory in organizational commitment. As per this theory, there are three distinct components to organizational commitment.

1. Affective commitment – Emotional attachment with the organization is described as affective commitment. High level of active commitment will lead to long term bond with the company.

2. Continuance commitment – This level of commitment will lead the employee to consider that leaving the organization is costly.

3. Normative commitment – This level of commitment will lead the employee to consider that he or she is obliged to stay in the company.

What is the Relationship Between Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment?

Job involvement and organizational commitment are closely related and interdependent. A person with high job involvement may have higher organizational commitment. Both organizational commitment and job involvement determine the retention of employees with the workplace. However, both concepts deal with individual emotions and psychology. Personality traits also play a bigger role in job involvement and organizational commitment.

What is the Difference Between Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment?

The key difference between job involvement and organizational commitment is that job involvement refers to the degree to which an employee is engaged in and enthusiastic about performing their work whereas organizational commitment refers to the bond between individual and organization. Thus, job involvement may depend on the desire of the individual for his profession or organization whereas organizational commitment solely depends on the organization.

Moreover, higher job involvement can be indicated if the individual is performing a task in his own favourite field. On the contrary, higher organizational commitment can be indicated if the individual has a positive work environment, positive feedback from the organization. Organizational commitment is directly responsible for employee retention whereas job involvement does not have a direct involvement for employee retention. So, this is too is a significant difference between job involvement and organizational commitment. Furthermore, job involvement will lead to employee motivation, performance, career growth, and satisfaction in their profession, whereas organizational commitment will lead to employee retention and job security.

Summary – Job Involvement vs Organizational Commitment

The key difference between job involvement and organizational commitment is that job involvement focuses on the individual’s emotion towards his profession whereas organizational commitment focuses on the relationship between the individual and organization.

Reference:

Image Courtesy:

1. “1447775” (CC0) via Pxhere
2. “3 component commitment model” By MarusYulina – Own work, (Public Domain) via Commons Wikimedia

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