Chamber of Commerce Membership: An Explanatory Model of Member Organizations’ Normative, Continuance and Affective Commitments

Organizations join associations to gain a wide range of benefits, such as advocacy in the local community, more expertise, or access to markets and new technologies. However, these benefits do not always result in readily observable positive outcomes as compared to the monetary costs and time investment for businesses. Such value judgements may result in lower commitment to the association and ultimately dropped memberships. The purpose of this study is to better understand the factors that drive member organizations’ commitment to a chamber of commerce. The results of the empirical study show a positive impact of members’ role expectancies and satisfaction with the chamber’s performance on their commitment to the association. Further, resource investment in the association, expressed as participation, length of membership time and organization size, have additional interactive influence on commitment. This study shows the importance of understanding the factors that drive commitment so that associations may design better ways to engage with different types of members.