Commitment to Nested Organizational Units: Some Basic Principles and Preliminary Findings

Relying on the fact that many organizations exhibit nested organizational structures, we identify several basic principles for understanding what produces different levels of employee commitment to the nested units. The principles identify the importance of the unit's distance from the employee, the capacity of the more proximate units to produce positive emotions, and the attribution process whereby employees assign responsibility for their positive emotions to a particular organizational unit. Specific hypotheses are derived from Lawler's argument about nested units. These hypotheses undergo preliminary tests for two nested organizational structures, one more centralized than the other. The hypotheses are generally supported.