Journal of Organizational Behavior J. Organiz. Behav. 24, 313–334 (2003) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/job.190 Organizational commitment, supervisory commitment, and employee outcomes in the Chinese context: proximal hypothesis or global hypothesis? BOR-SHIUAN CHENG 1 *, DING-YU JIANG 1 AND JEAN H. RILEY 2 1 Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan 2 Department of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Alliant International University, San Diego, CA, U.S.A. Summary This study examines the relationship between organizational commitment and supervisory commitment (commitment to supervisor) in terms of their effects on employee outcomes in the Chinese context. Based on the principle of compatibility, we hypothesized that organiza- tional commitment and supervisory commitment served as logical mediators (global hypoth- esis and proximal hypothesis) for predicting organization-relevant and leader-relevant outcomes respectively. Moreover, because of the impact of personalism in Chinese culture, we predicted that supervisory commitment also significantly influenced organization-relevant outcomes, in addition to its effect on leader-relevant outcomes. Two separate questionnaires were administered to 538 subordinates and their supervisors in Taiwanese companies. Struc- tural equation modeling and hierarchical block regression analysis shows that the principle of compatibility and personalism can explain the proposed relationship in this study. Implica- tions and research directions are discussed in light of Chinese culture for future investigation into organizational commitment and supervisory commitment. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Introduction In the past several decades, a great deal of research has focused on the effects of organizational com- mitment (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990; Meyer & Allen, 1997). Previous studies have demonstrated that organizational commitment is positively related to employee outcomes, such as job satisfaction (Bateman & Strausser, 1984), attendance (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990), prosocial organizational behavior (O’Reilly & Chatman, 1986), and job performance (Meyer, Allen, & Smith, 1993), and negatively related to turnover intention (Mowday, Porter, & Steers, 1982). However, these studies typically have only focused on organizational commitment and have not investigated the effects of different foci of Received 2 November 2001 Revised 24 September 2002 Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 2 January 2003 *Correspondence to: Bor-Shiuan Cheng, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, #1 Sec. 4-Roosevelt Road, Taipei, Taiwan 106. E-mail: chengbor@ccms.ntu.edu.tw Contract/grant sponsor: Ministry of Education, Republic of China. Contract/grant number: 89-H-FA01-2-4-4.