Mediating Effect of Affective Commitment on Organizational Factors and Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of organizational structure and process factors on customer satisfaction, and to examine the mediating role of organizational commitment (affective commitment) on these relationships. The Round 3 data from the High Performance Manufacturing (HPM) project were used for this study. The data includes 266 plants from 9 industrialized countries. A simple Sobel test demonstrated the partial mediating effect of affective commitment. Structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that when two structural factors and one process factor are considered, affective commitment partially mediates the effect of the flatness of organizational structure and supervisory interaction facilitation, but does not mediate the effect of the centralization of authority. Some limitations of this study are highlighted and future expectations provided.