ORGANIZATIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL COMMITMENT: EVIDENCE FROM CROATIA

The aim of this study was to explore organizational and professional commitment among Croatian employees, as well as to find out whether there were any differences in those commitments regarding employees’ demographic characteristics. The empirical research was conducted online in January 2021. The questionnaire was distributed online using convenience sampling method, which is a non-probability sampling method that involves participants from population who are available to participate in the study. The number of participants was 153. Research results indicated that respondents were slightly more professionally than organizationally committed. By observing each organizational and professional commitment dimension, research results showed that the level of professional affective commitment stood out, while the level of normative commitment, both organizational and professional, was the lowest. Additionally, research results showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the mean value of organizational commitment as well as of professional commitment regarding any of the respondents’ demographic characteristics (gender, age, tenure in the organization, education and marital status).


INTRODUCTION
Organizational commitment can be described as a bond or attachment of the individual to the organization (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990), while professional commitment represents the loyalty or the desire to stay in a profession; as well as a sense of responsibility toward the profession's particular problems and challenges (Jafaraghaee, Ebadi, Negarandeh & Mehrdad, 2017). Both organizational and professional commitments are usually observed through their dimensions: affective, continuance and normative.
Some Croatian authors have also invested effort into exploring organizational and professional commitment in the Croatian context. Namely, Maslić-Seršić (2000) has assessed and validated the research instrument for organizational commitment measurement. Krapić, Čoso and Sušanj (2006) have explored the connection between the big five-factor personality traits and organizational commitment. Vidić (2010) has dealt with the organizational commitment of primary school teachers. Additionally, Krapić, Pletikosić and Grabar (2011) have looked into the relationship between personality traits, job involvement and organizational commitment on the one hand and organizational citizenship behaviour on the other. Sušanj and Jakopec (2012) investigated organizational commitment in the context of fairness, job satisfaction and leadership style. Pomper and Malbašić (2016) have researched organizational commitment in the context of transformational leadership. Crleni, Lambaš and Malbašić (2016), as well as Krapic, Kardum and Barić (2018) investigated the influences of values on organizational commitment. However, the research on professional commitment in the Croatian context is rare. Recently, Barać, Prlić, Plužarić, Farčić and Kovačević (2018) explored professional commitment as a mediator between self-evaluation and job satisfaction.
The purpose of this research is to bring together the organizational and professional commitments, which is a novelty in the Croatian context. Namely, previous research studies have explored organizational and professional commitments separately. There are no research studies in Croatia that compare these two commitments. The results of this paper would have valuable initial scientific as well practical implications in the Croatian context. Therefore, this paper explores the level of organizational and professional commitment among Croatian employees, and tries to find out whether there were any differences in those commitments regarding employees' demographic characteristics. Thus, the research questions of this paper could be stated as: 1. What are the levels of organizational and professional commitments, and the levels of their dimensions among Croatian employees? 2. Are there any differences in organizational commitment and professional commitment regarding employees' demographic characteristics?
This paper is organized in the following way. The second section contains the theoretical framework. The third section explains the research methodology, with the stated aim of the research, sample characteristics, research instrument and applied statistical methods. The fourth section includes research results and discussion, while section five contains the conclusion, research limitations and recommendations for future research.
Analysing studies on organizational commitment, Meyer and Allen's (1991) three-component model is the dominant model for organizational commitment research. This model identifies and observes three dimensions or components of organizational commitment: affective, continuance and normative commitment.
Affective organizational commitment represents employee's emotional attachment to the organization. The effect of that emotional attachment is a strong identification with organizational objectives and the desire to continue as the member of the organization (Meyer & Allen, 1997;Bergami & Bagozzi, 2000;Zanagro, 2001;Marmaya, Zawawi, Hitam & Jody, 2011). Continuance organizational commitment is defined as "awareness of the costs associated with leaving the organization" (Meyer & Allen, 1997, p. 11). It is a result of the assumption of benefit that employee can have if she/he stays in the organization, and the assumption of cost that employee can have if s/he leaves the organization. Normative organizational commitment is a sense of moral obligation to continue with the organization. In the case of normative professional commitment, the employee commits to, and stays in an organization because of the feeling of obligation.

Professional commitment
Professional commitment is quite a new research topic emphasized by specialization in the workplace, which has resulted in increasing focus on professionalism (Morrow & Wirth, 1989). In the literature, there are many definitions of professional commitment. Professional commitment refers to the attachment of individuals in the profession or, in other words, to the strength of an individual's identification with a profession. Individuals with high professional commitment are characterized as having a strong belief in, and acceptance of professional goals, having a strong desire to maintain membership in the profession, and willing to use their efforts to advance the profession (Nasution & Östermark, 2012, p. 168). Professional commitment has been found to be negatively correlated with the intention to leave a profession (Blau & Lunz, 1998;Smith & Hall, 2008) and positively correlated to job satisfaction (Cooper-Hakim & Viswesvaran, 2005), and job performance (Somer & Birnbaum, 1998;Somech & Bogler, 2002;Tam et al., 2002).
As well as organizational commitment, professional commitment can be conceptually separated into three dimensions: affective, continuance and normative professional commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991). By observing professional commitment in those dimensions, a full understanding of this phenomenon could be obtained.
Affective professional commitment refers to the extent to which individuals want to stay in their profession due to emotional attachments (Shafer, Simmons & Yip, 2016). It appears when people stay with their profession because they desire to do so (Cho & Huang, 2012). Continuance professional commitment is the extent to which individuals feel they "have to stay" in the profession because of the accumulated investment that they have (e.g. in study effort, training, etc.), and the lack of other alternatives (Nasution & Östermark, 2012, p. 168). It seems that professional continuance commitment is rather pragmatic than idealistic (Nasution & Östermark, 2012). Normative professional commitment refers to the extent to which individuals feel they "ought to stay" in the profession. Regarding this commitment, the individuals feel they should stay in their profession due to a sense of obligation to it (Allen & Meyer, 1990;Cho & Huang, 2012;Shafer, et al., 2016).

Relationship between organizational and professional commitment
Recently, academics have devoted attention to the relationship between organizational and professional commitment. However, research results that pertain to this relationship, revealed inconsistent results. Some researchers found coexistence in both organizational commitment and professional commitment (Simpson, 1985;Wallace, 1993), while some suggested a conceptual distinction between organizational and professional commitment (Fiol et al., 2009). Namely, some authors propose that both organizational commitment and professional commitment are in line, but others suggest that greater organizational commitment leads to a lower level of professional commitment and vice versa (Singh & Gupta, 2015). Interesting research results were presented by Meyer and Allen, (1984). They showed that individuals could have high levels of both organizational and professional commitment, as well as different combinations of those commitments, like low levels of both or a high level in one and low level in the other. In accordance to this, Carson et al. (1999), in their research, categorized four types of individuals regarding the level of their organizational and professional commitment. Dually committed individuals are the ones who have high levels of both commitments; professionalists have a high level of professional commitment, but a low level of organizational commitment; organizationalists are those with high level of organizational commitment and low level of professional commitment, and uncommitted individuals have low levels of both commitments.

Aim of the study
The aim of this study was to explore organizational and professional commitment among Croatian employees, as well as to find out whether there were any differences in those commitments regarding employees' demographic characteristics.

Research sample and procedure
The empirical research was conducted in January 2021. The questionnaire was distributed online using the convenience sample method. This method is a non-probability sampling method that involves participants from population members who are conveniently available to participate in a study, usually online. At the beginning of the survey, participants were informed about the purpose of the study and their voluntary participation, and also that anonymity was guaranteed, that they could quit at any point without explanation, and that the data would be used for scientific purposes only. The number of participant was 153.  Women made up a slight majority of respondents (50.3 percent), those aged 41 -50 (26.1 percent), those having more than 21 year of tenure (25.5 percent), those with higher education (39.2 percent) and those who were married (54.9 percent).

Research instrument
The Organizational Commitment Scale (Meyer, Allen & Smith, 1993) was used to evaluate the organizational commitment. The validity of this instrument for research in Croatian was confirmed by Maslić-Seršić (2000). The Organizational Commitment Scale consists of 18 items, 6 items per each organizational commitment dimension. A 5-point Likert scale was used for participants' answers. The meaning of the scale was: 1 -strongly disagree, 2disagree, 3 -neither agree nor disagree, 4 -agree, 5 -strongly agree. Cronbach's Alpha showed high reliability of overall organizational commitment scale (α = .939). The scales of affective, continuance, and normative organizational commitment also showed high reliability coefficients of 0.925, 0.807, and 0.933, respectively. The total score of organizational commitment, as well as of each organizational commitment dimension represented the average value of participants' answers to the corresponding items.
Professional commitment was measured by Meyer et al.'s (1993) 18item measure. Each professional commitment dimension was explored by 6 items. This measure was back translated (English-Croatian-English) by two independent English language teachers. The 18 items remained similar after the translation process. A 5-point Likert scale was used for participants' answers. The meaning of scale was: 1 -strongly disagree, 2 -disagree, 3 -neither agree nor disagree, 4 -agree, 5 -strongly agree. Cronbach's Alpha showed high reliability of overall professional commitment measure (α = .865). The scales of affective, continuance, and normative professional commitment showed reliability coefficients of 0.839, 0.784, and 0.798 respectively. Here again, the total score of professional commitment, as well as of each professional commitment dimension represented the average value of participants' answers to the corresponding items.
The personal characteristics included in this research were gender, age, tenure, education, and marital status.

Data Analysis
Data analysis was conducted using SPSS 23 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). Statistical procedures applied in this research were Cronbach's alpha, Normality tests, Levene's Test, Independent Sample T-test, One-Way ANOVA, as well as descriptive statistics and correlation analysis.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The initial analyses were focused on descriptive statistics. These results are presented in Table 2.  Table 2 shows that overall organizational commitment has moderate mean value (M= 3.2). Some researchers have discovered similar levels of organizational commitment in Croatian organizations (Krapić et al., 2006;Krapić et al., 2011;Krapić et al., 2018;Markovina, 2013;Agušaj, 2016). Regarding the mean value of overall professional commitment, it was slightly higher (M= 3.4) than the mean value of overall organizational commitment (M= 3.2). This might imply that respondents were slightly more professionally than organizationally committed. Since there is no available research on the level of professional commitment in Croatia, it is valuable to present similar research results achieved by Singh and Gupta (2018), and Aghaei and Savari (2014).
The results of this paper are in line with the results of some previous research that has uncovered the coexistence of organizational commitment and professional commitment (Simpson, 1985;Wallace, 1993), since the levels of overall organizational and professional commitment were similar.
Observing each organizational and professional commitment dimension, research results showed that the mean value of professional affective commitment stood out. That value was 3.8 and has been the greatest of all commitment dimensions' mean values. Similar results have been shown in some previous studies (Meyer, Allen & Gellaty, 1990;Stallworth, 2003;Bang, Ross & Reio, 2012). This indicates that respondents' emotional attachment to their profession was the highest as compared to all other dimensions of commitments. On the other hand, research results showed that the level of normative commitment, both organizational and professional, was the lowest. The mean value of normative organizational commitment was 2.9 while the mean value of normative professional commitment was even lower, 2.8. This suggests that respondents neither felt a strong obligation to stay in their organizations nor in their professions. Comparing these results with the results of other research in Croatia, Krapić et al. (2018) showed almost identical results in organizational commitment dimensions. Some similarities of these results could also be found in the research of Sabella, El-Far and Eid (2016), and Cho and Huang (2012).  All variables were statistically significantly correlated with each other, with different correlation intensity. Organizational commitment was highly correlated to its dimensions, as well as professional commitment to its dimensions. Organizational and professional commitments were moderately correlated (r= .56).
The following analyses examined differences in organizational and professional commitment, as well as, in their dimensions, regarding respondents' gender, age, tenure in the organization, education, and marital status.
Shapiro-Wilk's test (p > 0.05) for all groups, as well as a visual inspection of their histograms, normal Q-Q plots and box plots showed that organizational commitment and professional commitment were approximately normally distributed regarding gender, age, tenure in the organization, education and marital status (not shown here). Levene's tests of homogeneity of variances were not statistically significant, which means that variances were equal, or groups were not statistically significantly different. Hence, the preconditions were met for Independent Sample T-test and One-Way ANOVA, as shown below.
Differences in organizational and professional commitment regarding respondents' gender were tested by the Independent Sample T-test, and presented in Table 4. Independent Sample T-Test, presented in Table 4, suggested that there were no statistically significant differences in the mean value of organizational commitment as well as of professional commitment between men and women. Some studies were in line with these results, and did not uncover differences in organizational commitment regarding gender (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990;Mahanta, 2012;Ajayi, 2017). In addition, some research has found no relationship between professional commitment and gender (Giffords, 2009;Freund et al., 2013). However, some research has found differences in organizational commitment regarding gender (Mowday et al., 1982;Matthieu & Zajec, 1990;Kumasey, Delle & Batchison Ofei, 2014;Jena, 2015) as well as differences in professional commitment regarding gender (Alom, 2018;Zabol et al., 2019).
The results of One-Way ANOVA, presented in Table 5, showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the mean value of organizational commitment as well as of professional commitment regarding respondents' age. Similar results were discovered by Meyer, et al. (2002); Chui, Tong and Mula (2007), and Akinyemi (2014), regarding the relationship between organizational commitment and age; and Giffords (2009), and Freund et al. (2013) regarding the relationship between professional commitment and age. However, a positive relationship between age and organizational commitment were found by Allen and Meyer (1993); Cohen (1993); Su et al. (200 9); De Gieter, Hofmans and Pepermans (2011);Nifadkar and Dongre (2014). Additonally, Anwer, Tahir and Batool (2012), and Beri and Beri (2016) detected a strong relationship between professional commitment and age.
The results of One-Way ANOVA, presented in Table 6, showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the mean value of organizational commitment as well as of professional commitment regarding respondents' tenure in the organization. In prior research, correlation between tenure and organizational commitment was not found (Ahmad & Bakar, 2003;Chui et al., 2007). In addition, Giffords (2009) found no relationship between professional commitment and tenure in the organization. However, the majority of research has found a positive relationship between organizational commitment and tenure (Allen & Meyer, 1990;Mathieu & Zajac, 1990;Cohen, 1993;Meyer & Allen, 1997;Meyer et al., 2002;Su et al., 2009;De Gieter et al., 2011;Amangala, 2013;Nifadkar & Dongre, 2014).
The results of One-Way ANOVA, presented in Table 7, showed that there were no statistically significant differences in mean value of organizational commitment as well as of professional commitment regarding respondents' education. Some research studies have shown a positive correlation between organizational commitment and education (Gallie & White, 1993;Amangala, 2013), and some have discovered a negative relationship between these two variables (Mowday et. al., 1982;Mathieu & Zajac, 1990;Khan & Zafar, 2013). Regarding professional commitment, Day and Gu (2009) showed that there were no differences in professional commitment regarding education, while Kannan and Pillai (2008) suggested a strong link between professional commitment and education.
Finally, the results of One-Way ANOVA, presented in Table 8, showed that there were no statistically significant differences in mean value of organizational commitment as well as of professional commitment regarding respondents' marital status. Similar results were presented by Mahanta (2012); Avci and Erdem (2017) regarding the level of organizational commitment, and Giffords (2009) regarding the level of professional commitment. However, in some research studies a positive correlation between organizational commitment and marital status was detected (Saifuddin & Nawaz, 2012;Nifadkar & Dongre, 2014;Jena, 2015), as well as between professional commitment and marital status (Salami, 2008;Sood & Anand, 2010).

CONCLUSION
The aim of this study was to explore organizational and professional commitment among Croatian employees, as well as to find out whether there were any differences in those commitments regarding employees' demographic characteristics. Research results indicated that respondents were slightly more professionally than organizationally committed. Observing each organizational and professional commitment dimension, research results showed that the mean value of professional affective commitment stood out. This revealed that respondents' emotional attachment to their profession was the highest as compared to all other dimensions of commitments. On the other hand, research results showed that the level of normative commitment, both organizational and professional, was the lowest. This suggested that respondents neither felt a strong obligation to stay in their organizations, nor in their professions. Concerning differences in organizational commitment and professional commitment regarding employees' demographic characteristics (gender, age, tenure in the organization, education and marital status), research results showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the mean value of organizational commitment as well as of professional commitment regarding any of respondents' demographic characteristics.
The presented results could be perceived as initial step in the research on the relationship between organizational and professional commitment in the Croatian context. It enhances the knowledge about the levels of organizational and professional commitment and their dimensions among Croatian employees. The practitioners could consider these results as valuable for their HRM activities.
The limitations of this research are the small sample and the convenience sample method, which does not provide insights into levels of professional commitment among different professions. Additional research limitation is the cross-sectional analysis that does not provide findings over a longer period. Therefore, for some future research, the research sample could be extended, an application of longitudinal study could be considered, and more advanced statistical methods could be used for data analysis.