Scholars and managers have been discussing and investigating assets that could offer superior performance for decades, and they found that human resources are the most important asset that enables organizations to improve their organizational performance. This study focuses on rewarding systems in universities as one of the human resource management practices, and its effects on universities’ organizational performance. Furthermore, it provides a research model which examines the direct and indirect effects of reward types on organizational performance, where affective commitment is used as a mediator between rewards and organizational performance. This study provides empirical evidence for affective commitment mediating the link between rewards and organizational performance in a sample of 825 academics and administrative staff at universities from Central and Eastern European countries. Exploratory and Confirmatory factor analyses were performed to assess the reliability of scales, whereas structural equation modelling was utilized to evaluate the proposed research hypotheses. Our results showed that affective commitment mediates the link between some rewards and organizational performance. Research results indicate the significance of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to improve affective commitment and organizational performance in universities. Moreover, this research also contributes to the knowledge of the antecedents of affective commitment and organizational performance.