Commitment is the mental or physical act of more directing increased resources to an activity or interpersonal relationship. Processes of cognitive dissonance may then increase the perceive value of the target and this may lead to increased involvement and motivation.
According to Baxter (1989), a commitment is an intention to (a) perform some action, (b) effect some outcome, or (c) produce some consequences perceived as obligatory requiring an investment of personal or social resources (e.g., time, effort, money) over some non-trivial period of time. Unlike wishes and wants, an intention contains the means of its own fulfillment and therefore constitutes self-directed action; there are no unconscious intentions.
As commitments are voluntary, once enacted, the actor is obliged to keep it. However, in reality there is no necessary one-to-one correspondence between commitment making and commitment keeping. Commitment making is incentive driven, but commitment keeping is driven by disincentives against not keeping the commitment. The greater one’s sense of obligation surrounding commitment making, the more likely is the actor to keep the commitment.
The sense of obligation constitutes the mechanism that unifies commitment making and keeping. The more that free choice is involved in the incentive-driven commitment making process (i.e., the characteristic absence of force or coercion), the greater the actor’s sense of obligation surrounding the disincentive-driven commitment keeping process.
Conceptually, A commitment encompasses two intersecting psychological dimensions and includes four constructs: the emotion-cognition dimension and the motivation-volition one. At the intersection, unifying commitment, is the concept obligation.
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