The 'psychological model' of organizational commitment has been widely investigated with respect to U.S. workers, but less frequently applied in cross-cultural studies. Results from a survey of 7,000 Japanese and U.S. production workers, reported here, indicated that the Japanese respondents expressed lower levels of organizational commitment than U.S. respondents. The variance explained in commitment by so-called 'Japanese management system' variables — organization structure and context, perceived job characteristics and personal practices — was also lower for Japanese respondents than for U.S. respondents. Implications for current models of commitment are considered; a new heuristic for studying commitment is pro posed.
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