In a study of corporate managers, we discovered a set of dynamics at play when people draw upon extra-contextual institutional commitments to enact an organizational role. Institutional research has focused on how people coordinate intra-contextual institutional influences but not on extra-contextual commitments such as family-related, religious, or political commitments, that people internalize and import into seemingly unrelated contexts. Research on the person-role-relationship and the intersections of work and non-work domains has examined the conditions under which people bring personally important elements from the non-work domain to bear upon their enactment of work-related roles but not how people actually draw upon extra-contextual institutional commitments. We identify three dynamics at play when people draw upon extra-contextual institutional commitments to enact an organizational role: distancing, anchoring, and engaging. People distance themselves from their role to anchor themselves in an extra-contextual institutional commitment and engage in enacting their role on the basis of their distancing and anchoring. Our work can inform research on institutions with a new focus on how people coordinate institutional commitments, and research on the person-role relationship and work-nonwork intersections by illuminating how people draw upon internalized extra-contextual institutional commitments.
