Commitment to the profession, defined as a volitional psychological bond reflecting dedication to, and responsibility for, one's profession is an important, yet under-researched form of commitment. Building on conservation of resources theory and temporal construal theory, we examine occupational future time perspective (OFTP), referring to employees' perception of the time and opportunities remaining in their career, and goal-supportive supervision, referring to employees' perception that their supervisor actively empowers them and stimulates their motivation to pursue their professional development goals, as predictors of commitment to the profession. More specifically, we expect OFTP and goal-supportive supervision to have positive effects on commitment to the profession. To robustly test these ideas, we collected survey data from 628 employees working in the Netherlands, occupying various professions and working in different industries.
Relying on a three-wave repeated measures random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM), we tested within-person effects over time, while accounting for stable between-person differences. Results provide support for the effect of OFTP on commitment to the profession at the within-person level and showed evidence for a reversed causation effect. Specifically, at the within-person level, there was a positive relationship between OFTP and commitment to the profession (β =.20, SE = .09, p =.021), and a reversed effect from commitment to the profession to OFTP (β =.38, SE = .17, p =.028), suggesting a recursive within-person process. While we did not find support for the expected within-person effect of goal-supportive supervision on commitment to the profession at any of the time points, we did find a significant reversed effect from commitment to the profession to goal-supportive supervision (β = .31, SE = .14, p = .027). Detailed findings, as well as their implications for commitment research, will be discussed in the symposium.