The Dynamics Between Organisational Commitment and Professional Identity Formation at Work

Abstract

In our new age of boundaryless organisations (Ashkenas, et al., 1995) and boundaryless careers (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1994; Hall, 1996; Sullivan, 1999), the role of the organisation as identity creator and the major recip-ient of commitment would appear to be less prominent than it was in the past. Within the post-corporate career realm (Peiperl and Baruch, 1997), professional identity is one of the possible substitutes for organisational identity. Indeed as Rafaeli (1997) describes, traditional perspectives on organisations tend to view membership as a simple dichotomy and deny membership status to individuals with non-traditional work relationships. Given that the major portion of an individual's life often revolves around organisations and work, investigations of forms of commitment in the workplace are vital for understanding the psychology of human behaviour. The need to explore more than one commitment form is timely given the changes in the workplace (Cohen, 2003; Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran, 2005). The typical working life of individuals is no longer tied to an individual organisation. In fact, individuals can anticipate changing jobs several times in their career. The rapid global-isation of business also suggests that individuals have multiple forms and bases of commitments (Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran, 2005). In this chapter, we present and discuss a conceptual framework of two major constructs in the study of organisational behaviour and 241 A. Brown, S. Kirpal and F. Rauner (eds.), Identities at Work, 241–260. © 2007 Springer. management, Organisational Commitment (OC) and Professional Identity (PI). Both are highly relevant to people's working life. The two are inter-related and associated, and have major implications on both work-related outcomes and the wider life of a person. Our understanding of both OC and PI benefited from subjecting these constructs to intense study.