The Instantaneous Commitment Effect: Developing Stakeholder Orientation among Managers

The authors introduce and investigate incoming managers’ instantaneous commitment - a novel concept increasingly relevant to frontline managers. Instantaneous commitment is a type of organizational commitment that can be formed expediently on the back of incoming managers’ preexisting role/work-related factors (stakeholder connections, relationships, and skills) offering organizations guidance on managers’ stakeholder orientation. Moreover, instantaneous commitment helps organizations avoid the classic loyalty-utility dilemma, as it provides an organization-wide instantaneous approach towards better stakeholder focus while being agnostic to emotional investment (loyalty) and to calculative assessment (utility) that may take shape over time. The authors provide a parsimonious explanation of instantaneous commitment construct and differentiate it from related constructs (affective commitment and continuance commitment). We also offer an understanding of how organizations can engender instantaneous commitment among managers. Finally, we develop a conceptual framework of a set of factors - prior role/work related antecedents, stakeholder orientation consequence of instantaneous commitment, and moderating influences of individual, environmental and new role/work related factors.