Commitment at work: how to explain the French paradox?

Résumé 0

French workers are known to report exceptionally low well-being scores, especially at work and may sometimes be considered as an outlier among developed countries. Commitment at work, and more precisely organizational commitment, follows the same pattern, confirming the French paradox hypothesis. This paper uses 2005 cross section ISSP data to explain this specific position. It compares France results to a top-ranked country, the United States, and a median one, Canada. The results confirm that organizational commitment of workers relies more on subjective evaluations of job outcomes than objective measures. Even if France still shows the lowest explained variance in regressions, we observe, in this country only, a congruence effect between the worker's preferences and his subjective evaluation of job outcomes. This finding supports the hypothesis of Person-Organization fit hypothesis to explain work attitudes.