Causes, correlates, and outcomes of union commitment

Abstract

The aim of the present thesis was to develop a process model of union commitment which would outline some of the causes and consequences of union commitment. A review of the literature on psychology's contributions to the area of labour revealed a lack of research but produced the conclusion that psychologists do have an important role to play in contributing to an understanding of the processes of labour organisations. Commitment to unions was chosen as the focus of the study because of its acknowledged importance in the development of a union psychology and its theoretical association with participation and democracy in unions. Drawing mainly on the literature on organisational commitment, a definition of union commitment was developed. The first study set out to test the stability and dimensionality of union commitment on a sample of blue-collar workers. A 23-item version of the Commitment to the Union Scale developed by Gordon, Philpot, Burt, Thompson, and Spiller (1960) and refined by Ladd, Gordon, Beauvais and Morgan (1982) was administered to black and white members of the same union. Using a factor analytic technique, five orthogonal factors were extracted. The first two factors, Union Loyalty and Responsibility to the. Union were found to generalise from previous studies. The remaining dimensions , Organisational/Work Loyalty, Belief in the Union, and Union Instrumentality,