Enhancing organisational commitment through task significance: the moderating role of openness to experience

Researchers have extensively explored the factors influencing employees’ organisational commitment. However, few studies make an explicit distinction between different commitment types when exploring its determinants, and the scholarly attention to individual differences is also limited. In this paper, we confirm that developing managerial interventions to enhance task significance can be useful to promote organisational commitment, but this relationship is contingent on the commitment type and the employees’ openness to experience. We focus on two forms of organisational commitment: affective and continuance commitment. Our study shows that task significance is a better predictor of affective commitment than continuance commitment. We also find that increasing task significance is particularly good to promote more continuance commitment among employees with low levels of openness to experience. Based on data gathered from a sample of 403 employees working in Spanish firms, we find support for these ideas and develop practical implications.