Values Congruence and Organizational Commitment in Churches: When Do Shared Values Matter?
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. 14(4) , 2022, DOI:10.1037/rel0000314
5 Pages Posted: 27 May 2020 Last revised: 18 Jan 2023
Date Written: 2020
Abstract
Leaders and attenders of many churches may feel a tension between contemporary values of Western culture and more conservative values that have traditionally been held by many churches. Discrepancies in values may cause some people to leave their churches. This pa-per examines the relationship between values congruence (between church attenders and their churches) and organizational commitment, specifically, affective organizational com-mitment which measures one’s emotional attachment to an organization (i.e., their church). In this study, church attenders (N = 252) provided information about themselves (concern-ing their personal values, their affective organizational commitment to their church, and de-mographics) and information about their churches (concerning the church’s values and size). The values measured included both behavioral (tolerance of homosexuality) and cog-nitive (agreement with evangelical doctrine) aspects. The results indicate that affective organ-izational commitment to one’s church is positively correlated with values congruence; no evidence was found that affective organizational commitment was correlated to the other variables measured. Further exploratory analyses indicated that this relationship between values congruence and affective organizational commitment varied with both the values of the church and the size of the church. In more conservative churches and in smaller church-es, values congruence was more strongly related to affective organizational commitment than in more liberal churches and larger churches.
Keywords: church, values congruence, organizational commitment, megachurches, conservativism
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