Feeling Connected With Work: Affective Commitment

Psychologists Christian Waugh and Barbara Fredrickson conducted an experiment where they “primed” subjects with positive emotions by showing them happy scenes from movies or pleasant images. The subjects were then asked to think of their best friend and then circle the picture on a chart that best describes their relationship. The pictures were Venn diagrams of a set of circles, one that read “Self” and one that read “Friend”. The set of pictures went from isolated circles in the top row to overlapping circles in the bottom row. Positively primed subjects chose the Venn diagram row at the bottom more often than the control subjects when describing their relationship.

The same principle applies for other relationships as well. This means that in the workplace when someone is feeling more positive, they are more likely to include their job in their sense of self and feel a closer bond with their job.

The result is that engaged employees have a higher emotional connection to their jobs and consequently put in more effort. In fact the research indicates that engagement is positively related with effort and negatively correlated with turnover.

Think about this, engaged employees average 27% less physical absenteeism, which saves organizations an average of 86.5 million days per year in productivity.

Psychologists have described this emotional attachment of an employee with their job as affective commitment. Affective commitment is the term to describe a sense of belonging and emotional connection with your job and/or organization.

An employee who is affectively committed to his or her job will be more emotionally and psychically involved with the responsibilities and activities of the position and organization, and employees who are affectively committed to their jobs will not only be more productive but also will stay longer with the firm.

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