Commitment, motivation, and incentives

Commitment in the workplace is one of the central constructs in the behavior of organizational members. Commitment, defined as a force that hinds an individual to a course of action that is of relevance to a particular target [Meyer and Herscovitch 2001, p. 301], has been found to be positively associated with outcomes beneficial to the organization such as job performance and citizenship behavior [Meyer et al. 2002], 

I find that central consequences of commitment such as job satisfaction and organizational citizenship are not associated with lead userness of employees. This was 

My findings suggest the existence of another target of commitment which has so far not been acknowledged by organizational research commitment to the product/use field. Embedded lead users are committed to innovation in this fleld, as they profit directly from innovation in a certain product/use field. One of the interviewed managers illustrates this dimension of commitment as he says  

This type of commitment can only be salient with persons in the firm who are at the same time users of the firm s product or service offerings. This adds more complexity to the relationship between different types of commitment One of the embedded lead users I Interviewed for my qualitative study explained the interplay between organizational commitment customer commitment and product-field commitment 

Then when you have a crew of customers, who does this just for fun, who all go out the night before, and you re in your bed, because you want to sail and win the race the next day and then the next day you make a lot of mistakes because the boys are not concentrated. [...]. So the sport changes for yourself, I don t know... I started it because it was fun, /I../ and also competition, but due to the high degree of professionalism, [..] it becomes more of a job, gets more stressing and changes a lot for yourself. (Sportl, embedded lead user) 

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