Understanding Affective Organizational Commitment of Chinese Employees: Evidence from Domestic Firms and Foreign-Invested Enterprises in China

This study has identified Chinese variables to explain affective organizational commitment (AOC) in China. Although scholars have increasingly tried to explore the antecedents of commitment in a Chinese context, unique variables related to China have been rarely examined. Thus, this study considers two main variables that reflect the China context, political identity and city residentship, as the determinants of AOC and examines their effects on AOC. This study further analyzes the moderating effect of domestic Chinese firms on the relationship between political identity and AOC to distinguish the effect of political identity in two types of organizations in China – domestic Chinese firms and foreign-invested enterprises. To test the hypotheses, 429 survey questionnaires from employees working for domestic and foreign-invested enterprises in China have been collected. Then, this study conducts mixed-effects multi-level regressions. The results show that the political identity of Communist Party members has a negative effect on AOC. This means that Communist Party members have a lower level of AOC than non-Communist Party members. The results also indicate that employees who are not urban residents tend to have a higher level of AOC compared to employees with the city residence registration. Further analysis reveals that the moderating effect of domestic Chinese firms indicate that Communist Party members in domestic Chinese firms are likely to demonstrate higher levels of AOC than those in FIEs. Business implications, directions for future research and limitations of the study are discussed at the end.