Examining the interconnection of job satisfaction and organizational commitment: An application of the bivariate probit model

Links between employees' commitment to their organizations and satisfaction with their jobs have been the subject of a large amount of empirical research, and still there seems little agreement about the causal connections between these two important employee attitudes. Understanding these attitudes is important because they have an important effect on organizational performance, and these attitudes can be influenced by human resource policies and practices. This paper assesses the gains from the use of a bivariate probit approach in measuring the connections between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. This paper is the first to make use of the bivariate probit approach in this context, and it improves our understanding of the connections between HR policy and these important employee attitudes. The approach taken allows a direct test of the hypothesis that job satisfaction and organizational commitment are jointly determined by demographic and policy factors. The results are compared with the results from the more traditional binomial probit approach to illustrate the degree of bias corrected by the bivariate approach.