Mediation effect of organizational identification on the relationship between person-organization fit and affective commitment to the political party

Abstract

     In the past twenty-five years, numerous studies have been conducted investigating the precursors of employees’ affective commitment to an organization. Nevertheless, most of this research has been studied within the context of public and private organizations, and research on organizational commitment for voluntary jobs is still scarce in a Thai context. The current study sought to extend the boundary of affective commitment by researching membership to political settings (for example, the Democrat Party, Thailand), and the ‘Youth democrat’. Young democrats volunteer for membership of the political party without monetary reward. Participants in the study were young democrats, recruited from the Democrat party, Thailand (N = 228). In the current sample, 67.1 percent of the young democrats were male and 32.5 percent were female and their average age was 21.50 years with SD = 1.86. A simple random sampling technique was employed. The results of the path analysis showed a good fit to the empirical data for the mediation model using the three variables of person-organization fit, organizational identification, and affective commitment (χ² = 2.757, df = 1, p = .097, CFI = .995, GFI = .994, RMSEA = .088). Organizational identification mediated the relationship between person-organization fit and affective commitment and the indirect effect of person-organization fit on affective commitment was also significant (indirect effect = .281, p < .001).