The aim of this article is to show how different factors influence the commitment of employees in an organization from an international comparative perspective. Commitment is studied as affective and continuance commitment. Personal characteristics, organizational and environmental factors are included as predictors that have an impact on commitment. The role of values and insecurity is also examined. It is proposed that these factors do not have the same impact on the two types of commitment in different countries and that this might have important practical implications. The study, which compared West Germany, East Germany, Japan, Hungary, Slovenia, the UK and the USA, was performed using the data from Work Orientations II, gathered by the International Social Survey Programme group (ISSP). The dataset is from 1997. The study finds that there are some predictors that are universal, but their configurations depend mainly on cultural background.
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