Comparative analysis of occupational commitment of self-employed and paid-employment

A profession is a job or a group of jobs with certain conditions and rules based on the knowledge and skills that individuals acquire through a certain educational process in order to sustain their lives and produce goods and/or services that are useful to people. Individuals generally gravitate towards professions that they believe they can do and that they think will provide them with material and moral gain. Individuals develop commitment when they spend time and effort to become equipped for their chosen profession, when they begin to identify with their profession by assimilating its values and ideologies, and when they position their profession in a more important place in their lives. Today, commitment is one of the most important factors that will make the practice of professions sustainable. Do individuals' commitment to their professions differ according to their employment preferences? The main purpose of this study is to reveal whether the occupational commitment levels of individuals will differ under different employment conditions. The quantitative method was used to analyze the data obtained from online questionnaires completed by 242 lawyers representing two different employment groups: self-employed and employed by an institution in Kahramanmaraş province. The three-dimensional Professional Commitment Scale developed by Meyer et al. (1993) was used to measure the level of professional commitment of the participants. As a result of the study, a significant and positive weak correlation was found between professional commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment and employment type, while no correlation was found between emotional commitment and employment type.