Paper Presented at the Academy of Management (AOM) Annual Meeting; Florida, USA 2013. A Qualitative Look at Organisational Commitment: identifying varied forms of Commitment for a group of public sector employees. Samantha Johnson University of Canberra; Australian Institute of Management, Centre for Public Management Deborah Blackman University of New South Wales Organisational commitment literature shows that continuance commitment can be varied in its form as a result of employment context influences. This study sought to explore possible variances in continuance commitment for a group of public service employees in the Australian context and if continuance commitment was dominant. Findings showed that a dominance of continuance commitment was experienced. However, the state of continuance commitment was varied in this context. Unexpected variances were identified in affective and normative commitment suggesting that the experiences of these employees was atypical of Allen and Meyer’s three component model. In this study a well-established OCQ was found to be unreliable and qualitative research methods were better able to identify how commitment was experienced in this context and to offer speculation regarding contextual influence. Implications for organisational commitment research and theory are discussed. Over many years researchers and scholars have delved deep into the construct of organisational commitment to improve our understanding of the construct and of the influences on commitment, to refine definitions, identify profiles and explore variances in the forms that commitment may take (Becker, 1960; Mowday, Porter and Steers, 1979; Allen and Smith 1987; Meyer, Paunonen, Gellatly, Goffin and Jackson, 1989; Allen and Meyer, 1990; Mathieu and Zajac 1990; Meyer and Bobocel, 1991; Allen and Meyer 1996; Kibeom, Carswell and Allen, 2000; Siders, George and Dharwadkar, 2001; Chen and Francesco 2001; Goulet, and Frank, 2002; Wright and Bonnett, 2002; Liou and Nyhan, 2004; Bentein, Vandenberg, Vandenberghe and Stinglhamber, 2005; Reid, Allen, Riemenschneider, and Armstrong, 2008; Gong, Law, Change and Xin, 2009; Gellatly, Hunter, Currie and Irving, 2009; Klein, Mollow and Brinsfield, 2012).