Does affective commitment positively predict employee performance? Evidence from the banking industry of Bangladesh

The role, effect and importance of affective commitment is predicted to be contingent to context in many extant literatures. However, no study has yet explored the disposition of contextual influence on affective commitment-job performance link. This study is designed to observe the difficulty of psychologically disassociating the affective commitment construct from other types of commitments (normative or continuance) among the respondents of a complex and rarely explored context of Bangladeshi banking industry. This case study is the first one to examine the institutional context for its possible influence on the link between affective commitment and job performance in two banks in Bangladesh for the purpose of literal replication. This study uses information from interviews and focus group discussions among 53 participants and survey results of 436 respondents from the selected banks. The qualitative findings preceded and informed the survey and helped to explain the quantitative findings in this multi-method study. The qualitative data has been analysed using recursive abstraction technique and thematic analysis. Structural equation modelling (in AMOS21) has been used to analyse the quantitative survey data. The results show that the external and internal contexts of the banks have considerable impact on the nature, perception and effect of affective commitment among the respondents on their job performance. Moreover, it is observed that affective commitment does not positively predict employee performance in the case study banks. Qualitative findings from interview and focus group discussions have explained why committed employees may not be the high performers and high performing employees may not be committed. The policy implication for the HR practitioners is that, adopting unfair HR systems may lead to undesirable retention of a genuinely committed but mediocre workforce incapable to get other job offers or low affective commitment and retention rate of high performing employees. Essentially, the banks should avoid unsystematic and non-transparent recruitment and selection practices, performance management system and compensation policy. In addition, the management should strategically align the career development opportunities to the organisational goals in order to ensure meaningful affective commitment that may lead to higher job performance.