The incremental validity of organizational commitment, organizational trust, and organizational identification

Article history: Received 17 December 2014 Available online 11 March 2015 Organizational commitment (OC), organizational trust (OT), and organizational identification (OI) are three types of psychological attachment to an organization. Each of these three variables captures an organization-targeted attitude toward an employment relationship, but it is unclear whether they have incremental validity over each other. To address this question, this study examined the incremental validity of each variable in predicting job involvement, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and non-self-report measures of task performance and citizenship behavior. It also examined whether perceived organizational support and psychological contract breach, two other organization-targeted attitudinal variables, were related to OC, OT, and OIwhen the latterwere considered jointly. Meta-analytical evidence suggests that OC, OT, andOI have incremental validity over and above one another in their relationships with some, but not all, of the above correlates. This highlights the need for future research to distinguish these three types of psychological attachment to an organization. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.