Little is known about the relationship between the negative forces in the firm’s external operating environment and employee attitudes toward the firm. We address this gap in the literature by assessing the contextual impact of ethnopolitical conflict on organizational commitment among employees of foreign-invested and indigenous firms in Sri Lanka. Specifically, we examine employee sensitivity to ethnic conflict (ESEC) to determine whether it contributes to explaining organizational commitment in an unstable ethnopolitical operating environment beyond job satisfaction and perceived organizational support, two well-established predictors of organizational commitment. The results of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that ESEC has explanatory power beyond these traditional predictors and is inversely related to organizational commitment. Further, perceived organizational support (POS) is found to attenuate the negative relationship between ESEC and organizational commitment in foreign-invested firms but not in indigenous firms. The data suggest that an operating environment beset with ethnopolitical conflict may exact an indirect cost on the firm through lowered employee commitment, and that foreign firms operating in such an environment can manage this potential cost by maintaining high POS among their employees. Implications for research and practice are discussed.