A Longitudinal Test of the Investment Model: The Impact on Job Satisfaction, Job Commitment, and Turnover of Variations in Rewards, Costs, Alternatives, and Investments

A longitudinal study of moderately professionalized technical workers was conducted to test a vanety of investment model (Farrell & Rusbult, 1981) predictions concerning the determinants of job satisfaction, job commitment, and turnover In general, greater job satisfaction resulted from high job rewards and low job costs, whereas strong job commitment was produced by high rewards, low costs, poor alternative quality, and large investment size Whereas the impact of job rewards on satisfaction and commitment remained relatively constant, job costs seemed to exert an increasingly powerful influence over time Investment size, too, was shown to exert greater impact on job commitment with the passage of time Just prior to their leaving, the job commitment of employees who left was best predicted by a combination of rewards, costs, and alternatives Employees who stayed and those who left were shown to differ from one another with regard to changes over time in each investment model factor—those who left expenenced greater decline in rewards, increase in costs, increase in alternative quality, and decrease in investment size than did those who stayed Turnover appeared to be mediated by a decline over time in degree of job commitment