An Examination of Variations in the Nature of Employee Commitment: The Case of Paid and Volunteer Firefighters

Organizations depend heavily upon employees’ willingness to make an extra effort. As such, employee commitment is very important to the effective operation of any organization. We argue that the previous concept of organizational commitment may not capture some important aspects of the organizational commitment construct. We identify three dimensions of commitment: commitments to the supervisor, the work group, and the organization. We examine differences in the foci of commitment comparing the organizational commitment configuration of a sample of paid and volunteer firefighters in Northern New York. All firefighters perform the same work and must meet the same job requirements so we anticipate any differences in the configuration of the organizational commitment construct to be a function of whether they are getting paid or not. We found significant differences between the two groups of firefighters in the foci of their commitment: paid firefighters are higher on their commitment to their supervisor, while volunteers were higher on commitment to the organization. We argue that conceiving organizational commitment as multi-focused construct offers more useful information to researchers and managers.