Continuance commitment and organizational culture – is there a relationship? : a study examining continuance commitment amongst university employees

Abstract: Organizations today are facing difficulties with gaining committed employees. As organizational success isdependent on employee commitment, researchers have in recent years implied that there is a relationship betweenorganizational culture and organizational commitment. Organizational culture is described as the shared values,norms, assumptions and beliefs of a group. Moreover, research has shown that commitment consists out of threecomponents, of which continuance commitment is described as employees need rather than willingness to staywith its employing organization. Although there are research concerning the two concepts in a profit-drivenorganizational context, there seem to be less research concerning non-profit organizations, such as universities.The purpose of this thesis is therefore to examine if there is a relationship between organizational culture and thecomponent continuance commitment in universities. This was done through a quantitative research approach, witha positivistic research philosophy. To collect empirical data, a self-completion questionnaire was designed anddistributed. The choice was made to limit the empirical context to three universities within the Swedish countrySkåne. These universities are Malmö University, Kristianstad University and Lund University. Further, the contextwas limited to employees at the faculties of business administration and economics.The results of this thesis indicate that no relationship between organizational culture and continuance commitmentexists among employees at the faculties of business administration and economics at the three universities.Nevertheless, the results indicate that half of the respondents recognized a lack of organizational culture, butbelieved in need for it to create employee commitment.