further exploring the meaning and measurement of career commitment

Journal of Vocational Behavior 32, 284-297 (1988)

Further Exploring the Meaning and Measurement of Career Commitment

GARY J. BLAU

Temple University

Using employee samples from a newspaper company and an insurance company, this study further examined the reliability and validity of a career commitment measure. The results of the study showed that across both samples, career commitment could be reliably measured and was operationally distinct from job involvement and organizational commitment. Findings are discussed in terms of the meaning of career commitment and the importance of further research in this area. 0 1988 Academic Press, Inc.

Career motivation is becoming an increasingly important topic to study in today’s changing workforce (London, 1983). For example, Rhodes and Doering (1983) have developed a model of career change linking career motivation to employee thoughts of quitting and turnover. One approach to understanding career motivation is by investigating an individual’s career commitment. Hall (1971) initially defined career commitment as “the strength of one’s motivation to work in a chosen career role” (p. 59), and he conceptually distinguished career commitment from job involvement and organizational commitment. In support of Hall (1971), Morrow (1983) has argued that career commitment, job involvement, and organizational commitment are distinct work referents which should be separately operationalized. Morrow (1983) also noted, however, that additional research is needed to better establish the discriminant validity of these work referents.

In an exploratory study of career commitment, Blau (1985a) developed a reliable measure of career commitment which demonstrated discriminant validity from job involvement and organizational commitment measures, using a sample of registered nurses. In this study, Blau (1985a) initially defined career commitment as “one’s attitude towards one’s profession

The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful manuscript comments of the Editor and two anonymous reviewers, and the assistance of Michelle Spare in gathering literature references. Please address correspondence and reprint requests to Gary Blau, Human Resource Administration Department, School of Business and Management, Temple Uni- versity, Philadelphia, PA 19122.

284 OOOl-8791188 $3.00 Copyright 8 1988 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

CAREERCOMMITMENT 285

or vocation” (p. 278). The anchors “profession” and “vocation” were viewed as necessary so as not to make career commitment overlap with other work references such as job involvement, organizational commitment, and work involvement. Based upon this definition of career commitment, a brief literature review of professionalism and related career concepts is appropriate.

Professionalism and Related Career Concepts

Based upon their review of the literature on professionalism, Kerr, Von Glinow, and Schriesheim (1977) outlined six characteristics of “ideal” professions: expertise, autonomy, commitment to work and the profession, identification with the profession, ethics, and collegial maintenance of standards. Expertise is generally developed from extended specialized training in a body of knowledge. Higher level educational requirements or long-term company training programs would be examples of acquired expertise. According to Kerr, Von Glinow, and Schriesheim (1977), autonomy is the perceived right to make choices about both the means and goals associated with one’s work. Means involve deciding how to accomplish something, while goals involve choosing what to accomplish.

Commitment to work and the profession involves looking at one’s dedication to work and career aspirations. A large body of research has investigated this characteristic, using terminology such as professional commitment (e.g., Jauch, Glueck, & Osborn, 1978; Tuma & Grimes, 1981) occupational commitment (e.g., Aranya & Jacobson, 1975; Downing, Dunlap, Hadley, & Ferrell, 1978; Scarpello & Vandenberg, 1986), career salience (e.g., Greenhaus, 1971, 1973; Greenhaus & Simon, 1977), and career orientation (e.g., Cochran, 1983; Liden & Green, 1980; Marshall & Wijting, 1980, 1982; Tinsley & Faunce, 1980). Jauch et al. (1978) and Tuma and Grimes (1981) measured professional commitment by developing multi-item scales to assess university researchers’ professional values (e.g., importance of contributing new ideas to one’s field, attitude toward producing new knowledge). As these authors noted, however, such scales would not be relevant indicators of professional commitment for every profession.

Aranya and Jacobson (1975) measured degree of occupational commitment by asking if an individual was willing to remain in his/her occupation if offered incentives (e.g., pay, self-development opportunities) to change. Thornton (1970) used a similar approach on a sample of junior college teachers. Downing et al. (1978) and Scarpello and Vandenberg (1986) operationahzed occupational commitment in terms of the individual’s desire to remain in an occupation following an assessment of feasible alternatives. One limitation is that these above-mentioned occupational commitment measures lack supporting reliability and validity information.

Career salience (Greenhaus, 1971, 1973; Greenhaus & Simon, 1977)

286 GARY J. BLAU

pertains to the importance of work and a career in one’s total life. Greenhaus (1973) factor analyzed his 28-item measure into three distinguishable scales: (1) general attitude towards work (e.g., “work is one of those necessary evils”), (2) vocational planning and thought (e.g., “planning for a specific career is usually not worth the effort”), and (3) relative importance of work (e.g., “I intend to pursue the job of my choice even if it cuts deeply into the time I have for my family”). Although there is supportive reliability evidence for the career salience measure (e.g., Greenhaus, 1971), several researchers have raised questions about its discriminant validity. For example, Morrow (1983) suggested that the item content of the career salience measure seemed partially redundant with job involvement (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965) and central life interest (Dubin, 1956) measures. Morrow and McElroy (1986) found empirical evidence supporting Morrow’s (1983) concern in their study of work commitment measures.

Career orientation has been defined and/or measured in several different ways. Co&ran (1983) defined an individual with a strong career orientation as

“one who has established an unambiguous occupational direction which is part of a bright outlook upon one’s career future, which is self-relevant, and which is grounded on a positive personal assessment,” (p. 3).

Many of the 17 items used to measure Cochran’s (1983) career orientation construct involve making a personality self-assessment (e.g., “feel like a competent versus incompetent person”; “feel like a worthwhile versus worthless person”). Additional validation work on this measure is needed. The strongest dimension for which Liden and Green (1980) found support in their analysis of career orientation was individual commitment to a larger class of work activities than a specitic job or organization. However, four out of the nine items in their factor structure of career orientation had multiple loadings on different factors.

In their measure of career orientation, Marshall and Wijting (1980, 1982) found two distinguishable factors-career centeredness and career commitment. According to Marshall and Wijting (1980, 1982) career centeredness is defined by the satisfaction expected from one’s career, the time one anticipates devoting to career activities, and one’s attitude toward the importance of work. Career commitment involves the extent to which work activities figure into life plans and the desire to work in hypothetical situations where there is no financial need. As Blau (1985a) noted, these factors seem partially redundant with the concept of work involvement (e.g., Gom & Kanungo, 1980; Kanungo, 1982). Thus validation

CAREER COMMITMENT 287

work is needed to demonstrate the discriminant validity of this career orientation conceptualization. Tinsley and Faunce (1980) measured career orientation using a one-item yes-no question, “are you usually employed outside the home?” Such an approach has conceptual and measurement limitations.

The fourth characteristic of ideal professions according to Kerr et al. (1977) is identification with the profession. Price and Mueller (1981) and Thornton (1970) measured professional identification by asking individuals the extent to which they engaged in particular activities such as joining professional associations or reading professionally related journals or books. As part of their operationalization of career identification, Schein, McKelvey, Peters, and Thomas (1965) asked the individual whether s/he had an institutional or noninstitutional frame of reference. According to Schein et al. (1%5), the noninstitutionalist does not identify with the organization and its goals, does not see his/her career in terms of the organization, and is willing to leave the organization. Additional work is needed with these professional and career identification measures to establish their reliability and validity.

Ethics and collegial maintenance of standards are the fifth and sixth characteristics of ideal professions (Kerr et al., 1977). Ethics is a perceived obligation to render service without concern for self-interest and without becoming emotionally involved with the client. Code of ethics among certain occupations (e.g., lawyers, insurance agents, doctors) and/or company-based employee rules and regulations handbooks represent op- erationalizations of the ethics characteristic. Collegial maintenance of standards is a belief that standards or rules should be enforced by fellow professionals (e.g., peer review committees which license members or review practitioner competence).

Based upon these six professional characteristics, it seems that the registered nurse sample used by Blau (1985a) in initially developing the career commitment measure would be classified according to Kerr et al. (1977) as highly professional. Registered nurses (1) have extended specialized training in a body of knowledge, (2) have considerable autonomy on their jobs, (3) are generally committed to their work and the nursing profession, (4) have the opportunity to join relevant professional associations and are expected to keep up with current practices through professional publications, and (5,6) have a code of ethics and peer review committees to maintain standards. In his discussion of career commitment, Blau (1985a) speculated that the supportive results for his career commitment measure would not generalize to “less professional” vocations or occupations. The purpose of this study is to test the career commitment measure on less professional vocations to see if corroborating reliability and validity evidence can be found.

288 GARY J. BLALJ

METHOD

Subjects and Procedure

The first sample was drawn from a newspaper company. One hundred and thirty-seven out of 164 (84%) nonunion first-level supervisors from the Circulation Department of a large eastern city newspaper company voluntarily completed and mailed back a survey. Prior to distribution, the survey was pretested on a small group of Circulation Department managers. The survey was distributed to subjects by the Circulation Department. First-level supervisors spend much of their time out in the field, and are responsible for overseeing the adult and teenage newspaper carriers who deliver newspapers to home subscribers. Among the job duties of first-level supervisors are recruiting, hiring, training, supervising and firing of carriers as necessary, and planning/coordinating newspaper deliveries from the Circulation Department to drop sites in the supervisor’s zone. Subjects were told that the purpose of the study was to gain more insight into their work-related attitudes and perceptions. To ensure that subjects were familiar enough with their jobs to candidly fill out the survey, Circulation Department Management recommended that only first-level supervisors with at least 6 months of job experience be eligible to participate. Since the surveys were anonymously completed and mailed directly back to the author, confidentiality of subject responses was preserved.

A demographic breakdown of the participating sample showed that (1) mean age was 35 years, (2) 93% were male, (3) mean job tenure was 4 years, while mean organizational tenure was six years, (4) 77% were married, (5) 70% had at least some college education, and (6) 21% were Black, 75% were Caucasian, and 4% were either American Indian or Asian. Conversations with personnel in the newspaper’s Human Resource Department indicated that these demographic characteristics were rep- resentative of the survey nonrespondents (16%, N = 27).

The second sample was drawn from field office personnel in an insurance company, and longitudinal data were collected. The insurance company is headquartered (has its Home Office) in a large eastern city. Since subjects were located in field offices around the United States, the Home Office Human Resource Department coordinated the administration of participant surveys. Subjects were told that the purpose of the survey was to explore the work attitudes and perceptions of field office employees. The insurance company was concerned about the high turnover rate of field office employees with several years of experience. So that their answers could be matched over time, study participants were asked to give their name and field office location. Subjects were assured that their participation was voluntary, and that their individual survey responses were completely confidential. Through the Home Office Human Resource


Department, a target sample of 210 college graduate field office employees with 1 to 4 years experience across five insurance divisions (field operations, loss control, claims, international, and agency) was identified. Within their divisions, these field office employees had differing levels of re- sponsibility for maintaining accounts, client contact, and inhouse staff supervision.

Of the 210 Time I (T,) surveys sent out, 129 (61%) were voluntarily completed and returned. These T, surveys asked participants for demographic information, and for feelings about their career, job, and organization. Six months later at Time 2 (T,), a second, shorter survey was sent to the 129 T, survey respondents. This second survey asked subjects for similar demographic information as the first survey, and their thoughts about leaving their jobs and changing careers. Company Human Resource personnel felt that 6 months was an adequate time period to examine how career commitment, job involvement, and organizational commitment could affect withdrawal cog&ions. of the 129 T1 respondents, 106 (82%) voluntarily completed and mailed back their Tz surveys to the author. Follow-up on the 23 Tz nonrespondents through the Home Office Human Resource Department indicated that 11 had left the insurance company between T, and T2, while the remaining 12 chose not to respond to the T2 survey. A comparison of the 106 repeat respondents to the initial T, sample (N = 129) revealed no signilicant demographic differences.

A demographic and geographical breakdown of the longitudinally tracked sample of 106 participants showed that (1) 54% were female, (2) 81% were not married, (3) mean organizational tenure was 2 years, and (4) 8% were from the Western region, 33% were from the Northeast region, 21% were from the Southern region, 21% were from the Mid-Atlantic region, and 17% were from the Central region.

Measures

Career commitment. Following Blau (1985a), career commitment is defined as one’s attitude toward one’s profession or vocation. Seven items were used to measure career commitment on a five-point scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 5 = Strongly agree). As noted in Blau (1985a), the content for the career commitment items was primarily based on items measuring occupational commitment (Downing et al., 1978) and career orientation (Liden & Green, 1980). The seven items consisted of the following (depending upon the sample involved): (1) “If I could go into a different profession other than the (newspaper or insurance) profession which paid the same, I would probably take it” (reverse-scored); (2) “I definitely want a career for myself in the (newspaper or insurance) profession”; (3) “If I could do it all over again, I would not choose to work in the (newspaper or insurance) profession (reverse-scored); (4) “If I had all the money I needed without working, I would probably still continue

290 GARY J. BLAU

to work in the (newspaper or insurance) profession”; (5) “I like this vocation (newspaper or insurance profession) too well to give it up”; (6) “This is the ideal vocation (newspaper or insurance profession) for a life work”; and (7) “I am disappointed that I ever entered the (newspaper or insurance) profession” (reverse-scored).

It should be noted that several changes have been made in this study’s career commitment measure versus Blau’s (1985a) eight-item career commitment measure. First, one item has been deleted. In his study with registered nurses, Blau (1985a) used an item, “I spend a significant amount of personal time reading nursing-related journals or books.” In the current study, this item was not felt to be appropriate, particularly for the newspaper sample. Subsequent testing of the item verified this (it had a weak loading in subsequent factor analyses). Also, the first item from the original career commitment measure, “If I could get another job different from being a nurse and paying the same amount, I would probably take it,” has been reworded in this study to better reflect the career commitment definition emphasizing “profession” as an anchor.

Job involvement. A 6-item scale drawn from Kanungo’s (1982) IO-item scale was used to measure job involvement. Job involvement is defined as the degree to which the individual identifies with a job, that is, the importance of the job to one’s self-image. Many of Kanungo’s (1982) items (e.g., “I live, eat, and breathe my job”; “the most important things that happen to me involve my job”) are based upon Lodahl and Kejner’s (1%5) original job involvement measure. However, the Lodahl and Kejner (1965) measure was not used due to its factor stability problems (Blau, 1985b). From his study, Blau (1985b) recommended that 9 of Kanungo’s (1982) 10 items be used to measure job involvement. However, based upon the participating organizations’ desires to keep the surveys as short as possible and eliminate perceived item redundancies, three job involvement items were eliminated. The author did not feel that such item elimination would jeopardize measuring the job involvement construct. Answers were recorded on a five-point scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 5 = Strongly agree), and items were linearly summed to create a scale score.

Organizational commitment. The nine-item short-form version of Porter, Crampon, and Smith’s (1976) 15-item measure was used to measure organizational commitment. Organizational commitment is defined in terms of the individual’s identification with a particular organization and its goals. The short-form was used to reduce the length of the survey. Evidence for the construct validity of this scale is provided by Mowday, Steers, and Porter (1979). A sample item is “I really care about the fate of this organization.” Responses were obtained on a five-point scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 5 = Strongly agree), and items were linearly summed to create a scale score.


Withdrawal cognitions. Withdrawal cognitions were measured from two different perspectives, job and career, for the insurance sample at T2. Job withdrawal cognitions were measured using three items theorized by Mobley (1977) and found (e.g., Miller, Katerberg, & Hulin, 1979) to be significant predictors of turnover: thinking of quitting, intention to search, and intention to quit. Responses to each item were obtained on a five-point scale (1 = Very unlikely, 5 = Very likely). Consistent with other researchers (e.g., Michaels & Spector, 1982), a three-item job withdrawal cognitions scale was formed by linearly summing the responses to each item.

Career withdrawal cognitions were measured using a three-item scale parallel to the job withdrawal cognitions scale, but using the word “profession” as a referent instead of “job.” The three linearly summed items were (1) thinking about leaving the insurance profession, (2) intention to look for a different profession, and (3) intention to leave the insurance profession. Item responses were recorded on a five-point scale (1 = Very unlikely, 5 = Very likely). Previous work by Blau (1985a) has shown such a career withdrawal cog&ions scale to have adequate reliability and to demonstrate discriminant validity from a job withdrawal cognitions scale.

Analysis

Following Blau’s (1985a) earlier study, factor analysis was used to determine whether the career commitment measure could be distinguished empirically from measures of job involvement and organizational commitment. Factor analysis has been previously used to test the discriminant validity of other measures, for example, job characteristics and job satisfaction (Ferratt, Dunham, & Pierce, 1981) and dimensions of job involvement (Blau, 1985b). To demonstrate discriminant validity, career commitment items should load on a different factor than the job involvement and organizational commitment items. A principal components analysis was initially carried out on the 22 career commitment, job involvement, and organizational commitment items for each sample to determine the number of dimensions.

To further test for evidence of discriminant and convergent validity, the relationship of career commitment to job and career withdrawal cognitions scales was compared to the relationships of job involvement and organizational commitment to job and career withdrawal cognitions scales. While job involvement and organizational commitment have shown a significant negative relationship to job withdrawal cognitions (e.g., Blau, 1985a; Miller et al., 1979), career commitment would not necessarily be related to job withdrawal cognitions since it has a broader referent (i.e., profession/vocation) than a specific job. However, individuals with

292 GARY J. BLAU

higher levels of career commitment should show less career withdrawal cognitions .

RESULTS

For the newspaper sample, a scree test (Cattell, 1966) performed on the principal components analysis indicated that a three-factor solution was the most appropriate and accounted for 57% of the total variance. Varimax and oblique rotations of the data were tested to see which would yield the clearest factor structure. The results indicated that a three-factor solution with varimax rotation was the “cleanest” and most interpretable. Table 1 presents the factor analysis. A minimum factor loading of .30 (Nunnally, 1978) was used as a guideline for considering an item to be part of a factor. As can be seen in Table 1, there were minimal double loading complications for items. The results show career commitment to be operationally distinguishable from job involvement and organizational commitment.

Similar factor-analytic results were found using data from the insurance sample. A three-factor, varimax-rotated solution was found to be the most appropriate, accounting for 55% of the total variance. Table 1 also shows the results of this factor analysis. As can be seen in Table 1, there were minimal double loading complications for items. Such results also show that career commitment is operationally distinguishable from job involvement and organizational commitment. Furthermore, a factor congruency coefficient (Harman, 1967) of .84 was found, indicating that the factor structure of the career commitment (as well as job involvement and organizational commitment) items remained stable across samples. Based upon these results, a seven-item career commitment scale was constructed by linearly summing items. This scale was used in subsequent analyses.

Descriptive statistics for the study variables, broken down by sample, are presented in Table 2. These descriptive results indicate that restriction of range is not a problem. As shown in Table 2, all of the variables have adequate internal consistency reliabilities (Nunnally, 1978). The patterns of intercorrelations among career commitments (cc), job involvement (ji), and organiz t’ al a ion commitment (oc) are as follows. For the newspaper sample, (1) cc-ji = .28, (2) cc-oc = .33, and (3) ji-oc = .31; and (b) for the insurance sample (1) cc-ji = .27, (2) cc-oc = .31, and (3) ji-oc = .30.

In sum, these results indicate that career commitment can be reliably measured and is distinct from job involvement and organizational commitment. Although career commitment is significantly related (p < .Ol) to job involvement and organizational commitment, the amount of shared variance is approximately 9% with job involvement and 11% with organizational commitment, indicating that these work referents are minimally


TABLE 1 Factor Loadings of Career Commitment, Job Involvement, and Organizational

Commitment Items by Sample

Newspaper Insurance sample” sample6

Factor Factor Item content 1 2 3 1 2 3

Career commitment 1. Would go into a different profession if

paid the same’ 2. Want career this profession 3. If could do it all over, would not

choose this profession’ 4. If had all the money needed, still work

in this profession 5. Like vocation too well to give it up 6. Ideal vocation for a life work 7. Disappointed that ever entered this

profession’ Job involvement

8. Most important things that happen involve job

9. Live, eat, and breathe job 10. Most of interests centered around job 11. Have strong ties to job which are diffi-

cult to break 12. Most of personal life goals are job-

oriented 13. Consider job to be central to one’s

existence Organizational commitment

14. Willing to put in unexpected effort to help organization

15. Talk up organization as a great place to work

16. Would accept almost any job to stay with organization

17. Find that personal values are similar to organization’s values

18. Proud to tell others that part of organization

19. Organization inspires one’s best job performance

20. Glad chose this organization over others to work for

21. Really care about fate of organization 22. This is best organization to work for

Eigenvalues Percentage variance

.21

.28

.18

.19

.07

.17

.Ol

.59 .25

.47 .24

.70 .21

.54 .25

.18 .52

.09

.19

.24 .27

.56

.57

.68

.22 .23 .49 .ll .20 .55

.26 JJ .57 .23 .28 .61

.21 .03 .60 .17 .ll .53

.26

.14

.20

.25

.lO

.OS

.58 .63 .17

.74

.79

.66

.27 .16

.04 .20

.04 .24

.I5 .06

.54 .08

.41 .05

.62 .07

.65 .ll

.69

.09 .17 .76

.21 .08 50 .13

.42 .22 .05 .07

52

58

30 L

.24

.03 .69

.24 .70 .29 .23

.I5 .41 46 .22

.75 .03 .22 .17

.65 .19

.12 .58

.26 .50 .20 .19

.70 .27 .25 .62

.26 44

- .03

SO

.53 354

8.7 40%

.12

.06

.ll 2.4

11%

.12 .04

.29 .46 .13 .25

.31 .53 .14 .27 1.2 7.9 2.6 1.5

6% 36% 12% 7%

o N = 137. b N = 106. ’ Reverse-scored item.

294 GARY J. BLAU

TABLE 2 Means, Standard Deviations, and Reliability Estimates of Variables by Sample

Variable

Newspaper sample” Insurance sample’

M SD a( M SD d

I. Career commitment 25.4 5.6 .83 23.8 5.1 .84 2. Job involvement 21.1 4.3 .80 18.7 4.2 .76 3. Organizational commitment 36.3 6.5 .88 33.1 5.9 .82 4. Job withdrawal cognitions 7.7 2.8 .90 5. Career withdrawal cognitions 8.0 2.9 .93

y N = 137. b N = 106. ’ Internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s (Y).

redundant with each other. Morrow (1983) has suggested that work referents such as career commitment, job involvement, and organizational commitment be regarded as independent constructs, allowing for moderate correlations (up to .30) between measures of such work referents due to common method variance.

As further evidence for the discriminant validity of career commitment, in the insurance sample the relationship between career commitment and job withdrawal cognitions (r = - .l 1; nonsignificant) was weaker than the relationships between job involvement and job withdrawal cognitions (r = - .21; p < .05) and organizational commitment and job withdrawal cognitions (r = - .23; p < .05). In terms of convergent validity, career commitment showed a stronger relationship to career withdrawal cognitions (r = - .36; p < .Ol) than to job withdrawal cognitions (Y = - .ll). These results are consistent with Blau’s (1985a) findings.

DISCUSSION

Overall, the results of this study extend Blau’s (1985a) initial findings that a distinct measure of career commitment can be operationalized. By finding corroborating reliability, discriminant validity, and convergent validity evidence for a revised version of the career commitment scale, the generalizability of the career commitment measure has been enhanced. As such these results provide support for Morrow’s (1983) recommendation that a general work commitment index, analogous to the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) (Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969) be developed. Such an index would be broken down into related but distinct work referent facets dealing with job involvement, organizational commitment, and career commitment, paralleling the related but distinct satisfaction facets of the JDI.

However, such a general work commitment index is still premature,

CAREERCOMMITMENT 295

since additional research on career commitment must be done. Keeping in mind the six characteristics of ideal professions-expertise, autonomy, commitment to work and the profession, identification with the profession; ethics; and collegial maintenance of standards (Kerr et al., 1977)-the current samples are less professional than the sample of registered nurses from which the initial career commitment measure was developed. Despite being lower overall on the six professional characteristics than other occupations such as registered nurses, doctors, lawyers, and research scientists, circulation supervisors and insurance field office employees are at least “partially professional” occupations.

For example, in terms of the six professional characteristics the insurance sample seems to have average expertise, above-average autonomy, average commitment to work and the profession, low identification with the profession, average ethics, and below-average collegial maintenance of standards. The newspaper sample seems to have below-average expertise, above-average autonomy, average commitment to work and the profession, low identification with the profession, below-average ethics, and low collegial maintenance of standards. However, the label “profession” may have been too loosely applied to these samples in an effort to distinguish career commitment from related work referents. Professions are a special type of vocation. Perhaps the term “profession” should only be applied to vocations which are consistently high on all six of the characteristics discussed by Kerr et al., (1977). If so, then less professional occupations such as those used in this study can be designated as simply “vocations.” Appropriate referents indicative of a vocation could be “field” or “industry,” as in the “insurance field” or “newspaper industry.”

Based upon this discussion, the definition of career commitment can be slightly revised to “one’s attitude towards one’s vocation, including a profession,” since profession is a special type of vocation. The emphasis is on the vocation itself (e.g., the insurance field or newspaper industry) rather than specific jobs within that vocation (e.g., underwriter or circulation supervisor). Even though the career commitment measure generalized to the insurance and newspaper samples in this study, as noted these samples could be characterized as partially professional. A question for future research to address pertains to the minimum levels of professional characteristics required, below which a measure of career commitment is no longer useful. For example, could career commitment be operationalized reliably and validly using samples of factory workers, custodians, or mechanics?

Another issue for future research is the causes of career commitment. In the current study, circulation supervisors had a higher mean level of career commitment (M = 25.4) than insurance field office employees (M = 23.8). One reason for this may have been the longer average tenure of circulation supervisors versus insurance employees. Blau (1985a) found

296 GARY J. BLAU

a significant positive correlation between nurse tenure and career commitment.

In conclusion, continued study of the career commitment construct seems warranted. For example, career commitment may play an important role in furthering our understanding of the causes for employee turnover behavior. As noted in the introduction, Rhodes and Doering (1983) have proposed a model of career change which suggests that career motivation is an important link in determining an employee’s desire to change careers and leave a work situation. Blau and Boa1 (1987) found that when people leave a particular work situation, it may not only be due to a lack of job involvement or organizational commitment, but because they wish to change careers. By understanding and learning to enhance individual career commitment (e.g., paying for relevant professional association memberships, rewarding professional activities), organizations can help develop a more stable workforce.

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Received: February 25, 1987.

further exploring the meaning and measurement of career commitment

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