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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility of curvilinear patterns of relationships between workplace affective commitment and in‐role performance, organizational citizenship behaviors and burnout. As most commitment theories assume strictly linear relations with these outcomes, demonstrating that these positive associations do not hold above some ceiling point in the commitment continuum is potentially important for research and practice.

The possibility of nonlinear relations was examined in a sample of 273 hospital employees.

The results yielded strong support for the authors' hypotheses. Indeed, most of the relations observed (ten of 15) between affective commitment foci and work outcomes were curvilinear, revealing a ceiling to the positive association between commitment and outcomes. Although these results vary in strength across work outcomes and commitment targets, they reveal that affective commitment has negative associations with employee productivity and psychological health at extreme levels.

Methodologically, these results illustrate the need to systematically explore the true nature of relations among constructs, even in areas where it is assumed to be well known. Practically, these results suggest that, ultimately, moderate levels of commitment may be more beneficial than extremely high levels.

This paper seeks to examine the relationships between affective commitment and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) across four foci: organizations, supervisors, coworkers, and customers. Further, it aims to determine whether relationships among commitments and OCBs involve mediated linkages.

This study relies on matched employee‐supervisor data (n=216). The relative fit of different models representing relationships among commitments and OCBs was examined using structural equations modeling.

Results revealed that commitments to coworkers, customers and supervisors displayed positive relationships with OCBs directed at parallel foci. In addition, commitment to the global organization partially and negatively mediated the relationship of commitments to coworkers and customers to parallel OCBs dimensions. Results also revealed cross‐foci relationships between local commitments and OCBs. Finally, no commitment target was significantly associated with organization‐directed OCBs but the latter were positively related to local OCBs.

The paper demonstrates that multiple commitments and OCBs are involved in a complex net of relationships among which local foci play a critical, and positive, role.