Development and Validation of a Commitment to Organizational Career Scale: At the Crossroads of Individuals’ Career Aspirations and Organizations’ Needs

This paper introduces the construct of commitment to an organizational career (COC). Conceptualized as a specific form of goal commitment, COC reflects an individual’s commitment to the goal of pursuing a long and successful career in an organization. We developed a 5-item measure of COC and examined its validity and reliability in four studies involving employees from diverse organizations and occupations (Ns = 312, 187, 199, 309). We explore COC’s distinctiveness from related constructs, including organizational commitment components (i.e., affective, normative, and continuance subdimensions) and career commitment, as well as its ability to predict turnover intention and voluntary turnover. Finally, we examine COC’s antecedents and specify boundary conditions to its relationship to turnover. Overall, results support the reliability and validity of the COC measure. We discuss how COC contributes to generate promising research avenues for the careers and commitment literatures