Empowering commitment: unraveling the impact of motivating language and the mediating role of trust

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the direct and indirect effects of motivating language on organizational commitment, as this phenomenon has drawn the attention of researchers. Design/methodology/approach This study employs social exchange theory and motivating language theory to examine data collected from 217 full-time employees across various US-based companies. The proposed hypotheses were analyzed using the PLS-SEM method. Findings This study’s findings demonstrate that motivating language positively affects employees’ organizational commitment and affective trust but not cognitive trust, which mediates the relationship between motivating language and organizational commitment. Research limitations/implications There are some limitations of our study that need to be mentioned. First, there are concerns about survey data collection via M-Turk (Shapiro et al., 2013). We attempted to overcome some of these problems by including questions to identify careless respondents. Also, we eliminated many respondents who completed the surveys in unreasonably short periods of time. Hence, we believe we accounted for response bias with these check points. Also, while we believe our final sample is a representative sample due to the significant amount of data elimination during the data collection, we believe that checking for non-response bias, as Armstrong and Overton (1977) suggest, is imperative. Unfortunately, due to the nature of M-Turk, that is impossible. However, M-Turk recruits respondents based on the parameters provided by the researchers, so we expect the non-respondents to be not significantly different from the respondents. In parallel to that, we acknowledge the limitations of our study sample. Due to that reason, our findings must be considered within the context of our sample parameters. We urge future researchers of this area to further validate our findings in different types of samples. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to analyze the impact of motivating language on organizational commitment and the mediating role of trust (cognitive and affective) in this relationship.