oa Betrokken bladen - Een categorisatiemodel voor tekstuele betrokkenheidelementen in personeelsbladen

A main goal of employee magazines is to increase employee commitment (Kikkert, 1988; Smith, 1997; Van Ruler, 1992). How those magazines pursue this goal and whether or not they actually increase employee commitment, has hardly been studied. We developed a model with three textual elements of commitment: the source, the type of information, and the goal of the magazine article. Twenty Dutch employee magazines were analyzed (496 articles). On the basis of the categorization model, we were able to distinguish between high and low committed magazines. To test the model, a survey was carried out in two organizations with a high committed magazine and two organizations with a low committed employee magazine. Thus, we were able to establish the relation between the levels of commitment in magazine and employees. Employees who read a high committed magazine were significant more committed to their organization than employees who read a low committed magazine. Our model appears to be suitable to categorize textual elements of commitment and to distinguish high and low committed employee magazines.