Employees’ Openness to Experience and their organizational commitment: the potential moderating role of job characteristics
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2024-06-27
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en
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Committed employees are crucial in today’s competitive, knowledge-intensive labour market, making it essential to examine how and why employees become committed to their organizations. While previous research mainly focused on instrumental explanations, socioemotional explanations might lead to a stronger organizational commitment. This research explores a potential socioemotional explanation, namely indirect person-job fit, combining personal and situational antecedents. The theory of purposeful work behavior (TPWB) is used to explain the potential indirect person-job fit between the personality trait Openness to Experience (OtE) and two job characteristics: job autonomy and task variety. The focus is on the trait OtE, as this is the least studied Big Five trait in commitment research and has high value for organizations nowadays. Despite OtE’s association with seeking new experiences, resulting in a predicted negative relationship with organizational commitment, aligning job characteristics with this trait could potentially enhance employees’ organizational commitment. Based on the TPWB, this study therefore focused on the possible moderating role of job autonomy and task variety on the relationship between OtE and organizational commitment, using data from 455 employees participating in the Healthy Brain Study. The results confirmed a negative relationship between OtE and organizational commitment, but no significant moderating relationship was found for job autonomy and task variety. Future research should further examine the moderating role of these and other job or organizational characteristics to boost the organizational commitment of employees high on OtE.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen