In the past 20 years, there has been a tremendous increase in the research efforts to explore and understand the nature, antecedents, and consequences of organizational commitment. Research in this area has covered a wide spectrum of topics and has been related to a multitude of antecedents and consequent variables but environmental rather than dispositional sources are typically considered, despite a surge in research looking at the dispositional sources of other job attitudes, such as job satisfaction. A large number of studies have demonstrated the effect of a person's disposition on job satisfaction lending support to the argument that a person's job satisfaction is stable over time and across careers and jobs. Although organizational commitment, like job satisfaction, is a job attitude, so far little attention has been paid to understand the role of dispositions in determining organizational commitment of the employees. This paper primarily focuses on bringing together some of the varied researches with the objective of providing some clarity with respect to the origin and understanding of the dispositional predictors of organizational commitment. Besides, it provides directions and suggestions for future researches in the field of organizational commitment.

Over the past two decades, there has been an increase in the research efforts trying to explore and understand the nature, antecedents, and consequences of organizational commitment (Mathieu and Zajac, 1990; Dunham et al., 1994; and Kirkman and Shapiro, 2001). A large number of research reviews and meta-analysis have concluded that organizational commitment plays an important role in predicting work behavior. Research has also shown that organizational commitment significantly correlates with job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior, turnover intentions, work performance, employee motivation and thus appears to be a crucial factor in understanding and enhancing work effectiveness (Porter et al., 1976; Mowday et al., 1982; Mathieu and Zajac, 1990; Cohen, 1993a and 1993b; Meyer and Allen, 1997; Meyer et al., 2002; Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran, 2005; Riketta and Van Dick, 2005; Chughtai and Zafar, 2006; and Kumar and Giri, 2007). Commitment has been the subject of various theoretical reviews (Reichers, 1985; and Lawler, 1992), and overview books (Morrow, 1993; Meyer and Allen, 1997; Cohen, 2003; and Klein et al., 2009), largely because of its relationship with turnover intentions as employees with low level of commitment are more likely to leave their organizations whereas highly committed employees wish to remain with their employing organizations (Mowday et al., 1982; Cohen, 1993a and 1993b; and Meyer et al., 2002).

Mathieu and Zajac (1990) in their meta-analysis have given a comprehensive presentation of antecedents, correlates and consequences of organizational commitment. They performed 48 meta-analyses in which they discovered 26 variables classified as antecedents, 8 as consequences and 14 as correlates. Given this relationship of organizational commitment with important work related variables it becomes important to understand the antecedents of organizational commitment so that one can have better control over various favorable work outcomes. In fact, there are a number of research studies that aims to explore the antecedents of organizational commitment (Cohen, 1992; Muthuveloo and Rose, 2005; Gelade et al., 2006; Bakhshi et al., 2009; Kumar and Giri, 2009). Although the studies trying to identify the antecedents of organizational commitment have increased over the past few years, environmental rather than dispositional sources are typically considered, despite a surge in research looking at the dispositional sources of other job attitudes, such as job satisfaction (e.g., Judge et al., 2002).

Organizational Behaviour Journal, Organizational Commitments, Job Satisfaction, Hierarchical Organizations, Continuance Commitment, Interpersonal Interactions, Empirical Research, Work Environment, Social Environment, Political Liberalism, Bbehavioral Tendencies.