Abstract

Implicitly or explicitly, the commitment literature considers that commitment changes over time: employees adjust their levels of commitment based on how they interpret and make sense of their perceived bond with the organization. Within the current arsenal of statistical procedures available to researchers, latent growth modeling (LGM) has emerged as a powerful approach to capture change over time in commitment research. This powerful analytic approach allows one to address important questions such as: What is the form of intra-individual change in commitment trajectory? Is the change in commitment faster for some individuals than for others? Are there measurable factors that could predict the rate of change in commitment? After a brief presentation of the LGM approach, this chapter reviews the commitment studies that have used this approach to track intra-individual change in commitment and related variables, and outlines the preliminary insights of these studies.