Loyalty, Value Congruency,and Affective Organizational Commitment: An Empirical Study

This paper reports findings of a study designed to test a hypothesized relationship between generalized values of loyalty and duty; individual and organization value congruency; and organizational commitment offered by Yoash Wiener. He argued that, “a fullerexplanation of individual behavior in an organization requires a consideration of effect of generalized values of loyalty and duty.” These generalized values are considered to be a person’s predisposition or internalized normative pressure to be committed to institutions such as family, friends, country, and work organization as a result of primary socialization with a culture that places premium on loyalty to institu‐tions or organizations (Wiener 1982).While the results show some evidence to support existence of generalized value of loyalty and duty among employees, it did not, for the most part, significantly correlate with measures of organizational commitment.Measures of value congruency, however, were found to significantly correlate with those of organizational commitment. The conclusion that primary cultural socialization should be considered in employee selection process (even though illegal) for the purpose of identifying and selecting individuals who are generally predisposed to commit to organizations, is not supported.