Psychosocial Work Characteristics as Predictors of Affective Organisational Commitment: A Longitudinal Multi-Level Analysis of Occupational Well-Being

The purpose of this study was to identify longitudinal associations between psychosocial work characteristics and affective organisational commitment among 6,299 employees in the Danish eldercare services. Individual-level measures and group-level measures of psychosocial work characteristics were included in multi-level analyses. At the workgroup level, quality of leadership, influence at work, emotional demands, and work pace predicted affective organisational commitment at follow-up. At the individual level, quality of leadership, influence at work, team climate, role ambiguity, and work pace predicted affective organisational commitment at follow-up. Finally, a multi-level model including both individual-and group-level measures showed that quality of leadership measured at the group level and influence at work and quality of leadership measured at the individual level contributed to predicting affective organisational commitment at follow-up, while adjusting for baseline levels of affective organisational commitment. The results thus imply that affective organisational commitment is conditioned by individual and contextual factors in the psychosocial work environment and that multi-level models add to our understanding of complex organisational phenomena. As affective organisational commitment can be considered an important constituent of occupational well-being, implications for interventions in the psychosocial work environment to increase affective organisational commitment are also discussed.