A longitudinal test of the investment model: The impact on job satisfaction, job commitment, and turnover of variations in rewards, costs, alternatives, and investments.

Caryl E. Rusbult, Dan Farrell·1983·Journal of Applied Psychology

Abstract

A longitudinal study of moderately professionalized technical workers was conducted to test a vanety of investment model (Farrell & Rusbult, 1981) predictions concerning the determinants of job satisfaction, job commitment, and turnover In general, greater job satisfaction resulted from high job rewards and low job costs, whereas strong job commitment was produced by high rewards, low costs, poor alternative quality, and large investment size Whereas the impact of job rewards on satisfaction and commitment remained relatively constant, job costs seemed to exert an increasingly powerful influence over time Investment size, too, was shown to exert greater impact on job commitment with the passage of time Just prior to their leaving, the job commitment of employees who left was best predicted by a combination of rewards, costs, and alternatives Employees who stayed and those who left were shown to differ from one another with regard to changes over time in each investment model factor—those who left expenenced greater decline in rewards, increase in costs, increase in alternative quality, and decrease in investment size than did those who stayed Turnover appeared to be mediated by a decline over time in degree of job commitment

Cites (1)

  1. Knee-deep in the big muddy: a study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action
    Staw, Barry M. · 1976 · Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

Show all 1 references

Cited by (13)

  1. A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment
    Meyer, John P., Allen, Natalie J. · 1991 · Human Resource Management Review
  2. Job demands, job resources, and their relationship with burnout and engagement: a multi‐sample study
    Schaufeli, Wilmar B., Bakker, Arnold B. · 2004 · Journal of Organizational Behavior
  3. WHY PEOPLE STAY: USING JOB EMBEDDEDNESS TO PREDICT VOLUNTARY TURNOVER.
    Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., Erez, M. · 2001 · Academy of Management Journal
  4. A Review and Reconceptualization of Organizational Commitment
    Reichers, Arnon E. · 1985 · The Academy of Management Review
  5. Sustained helping without obligation: Motivation, longevity of service, and perceived attitude change among AIDS volunteers.
    Omoto, Allen M., Snyder, Mark · 1995 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

See all 789

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A longitudinal test of the investment model: The impact on job satisfaction, job commitment, and turnover of variations in rewards, costs, alternatives, and investments. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0021-9010.68.3.429
The paper
Rusbult, C. E., & Farrell, D. (1983). A longitudinal test of the investment model: The impact on job satisfaction, job commitment, and turnover of variations in rewards, costs, alternatives, and investments. Journal of Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037//0021-9010.68.3.429

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.