Workplace Commitment Revisited: Adaptation and Cross-Cultural Validation of a New Measurement Scale in a Francophone Context

Workplace commitment is a key concept in organizational behavior and for practitioners because of its ability to enhance the predictability of highly desirable behaviors in contemporary organizations such as turnover intention, attendance or organizational citizenship behaviors. Research is still active in this area and the predominance of the three-dimensional approach of commitment initially proposed by Meyer and Allen (1991), has been regularly questioned and alternative proposals have emerged. Of these proposals, one addresses several fundamental problems raised by the three-component model (TCM) view by redefining the pivotal concept of commitment in a more concise and precise format (Klein et al., 2012, 2014). This new approach is accompanied by a compact and versatile measurement instrument, the unidimensional target neutral commitment measure (KUT), which has not yet been fully validated in a Francophone context. The objective of this article is to argue the interest of moving towards a new definition of commitment, and to contribute to the validation of the KUT scale in a French context. We have carried out this operation in several stages, mobilizing five samples comprising a total of 2096 employees working in four French-speaking countries (France, Switzerland, Belgium and Canada). Overall, we show that the French version of the KUT scale exhibits adequate psychometric properties and cultural invariance between the four sub-samples.