Abstract:
Commitment that employees' feeling of attachment towards the organisation and the occupation has been well entrenched in the realm of organisational studies underscoring its importance of resultant behavioural outcomes such as performance, job satisfaction, turnover intention, etc. Remarkably, the majority of those studies are of Western provenance reflecting such country-specific factors including the lower the unemployment rate, benefit of the dole, labour laws, etc; nonetheless, studies were lopsided in less economically developed nations. Drawing on personenvironment fit theory, this study poses a nagging question of whether both commitment to occupation and commitment to organisation are a syndrome of employee's performance under a high level of unemployment and less supportive labour laws. Therefore, the overriding purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between both nature of commitments (occupation and organisation) and employees' performance. Hinging on strong ontological and epistemological assumptions, this study adopted a survey strategy with the deductive approach. Data were gleaned from a randomly selected 150 employees working in eight finance companies using a self-reported questionnaire. The results of the study revealed that both commitment to occupation and commitment to organisation were positively associated. Albeit the commitment to occupation was significantly positively related to employees' performance, on the contrary, the commitment to organisation was negatively impacted the employees' performance. The negative relationship would be attributed to country-specific factors such as unemployment level, low level of employment protection, labour laws, etc. This study indisputably makes theoretical contributions to the frontiers of commitment literature and underscored the usefulness of practical implications for management and practitioners.
