Exploring the relationship between organizational commitment and employee beliefs, expectations, and experiences of mission in a values-based organization

This study examined the relationship between organizational commitment and employee beliefs, expectations, and experiences of mission in a values-based organization that hires for mission. In theory, hiring for mission should allow an organization to attain high levels of shared vision and organizational commitment. At the same time, however, a vast amount of literature suggests that there are many other factors involved in employee commitment besides congruity between employee and organizational values.; A feedback loop was used to illustrate how employee-organizational values congruence contributes not only to shared vision, but also to the psychological contracts that employees form with organizations. The study was based on the theory that if employees internalize mission values which seem to address basic human needs and then find that they do not experience these values while working within an organization, their unmet needs and expectations may cause them to become less willing to affectively commit to the organization.; The Organizational Commitment Questionnaire was used to measure organizational commitment, and a tri-level instrument, the Beliefs, Expectations, and Experiences of Mission Survey, was developed to measure employee beliefs, expectations and experiences of 12 mission values taken from the mission statement of a church-related university. An organizational census was conducted on 730 full-time employees. Data from 352 respondents were analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Kruskal-Wallis One-Way Analysis of Variance by Ranks, and Multiple Regression.; Consistent with the literature on psychological contracts and organizational commitment, the study found that workplace experiences were far more predictive of affective commitment than was employee-organizational values congruence. The trend lines of several graphs illustrated that employee commitment was highly related to employee experiences of mission values but not necessarily related to employee belief in these values. The study found a moderately high level of organizational commitment and high levels of mission beliefs and expectations, but a substantially lower level of mission experiences. In terms of individual mission values, the data showed that by itself, experience of truth while working within the organization explained over 44% of the variance in organizational commitment scores.