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Faculty Organizational Commitment and Citizenship

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Abstract

Building on a theoretical framework that links characteristics of individuals and their work settings to organizational commitment (OC) and citizenship behavior, this study considers why faculty may be disengaging from institutional service. Analyses of survey data collected from a state system of higher education suggest that job characteristics, exchanges and social learning are associated with faculty members’ OC. For instance, opportunities for advancement and research support, as well as responsiveness of administrators to faculty, contributed to the likelihood that faculty would accept a position at their institution again if given the chance. Commitment, however, did not significantly affect time spent on institutional service. Two job characteristics—time spent on research and time spent on teaching—were negatively associated with this behavior.

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Notes

  1. The items comprising the survey were adapted from NSOPF and Faculty at Work (Blackburn and Lawrence 1995).

  2. A survey item asking the respondents’ satisfaction with salary was part of the factor analysis, but the item did not load on a lower order exchange measure. Nonetheless, we initially included it as a separate independent variable in the regression analyses. Neither the Benefits measure nor the individual Salary variable was significantly associated with OC or OCB, so for model parsimony we excluded Salary from the final results reported here.

  3. Although a dichotomous OC variable was used in the results reported here, a three-category OC variable was also created and tested using a multinomial logistic regression. The results indicated that there was no statistical difference between the two groups that make up the “Committed” category in the dichotomous OC variable. As a result, the dichotomous variable, being the more parsimonious of the two, was utilized in this study. However, future researchers may consider using an OC variable with more than two categories.

  4. Given that 77% of our respondents indicated they were committed to their present universities, we compared the OC item mean for our total sample with the OC scale mean reported by Daly and Dee (2006). In both instances, the samples tend to be quite positive in terms of their commitment. The item mean in our study was 5.11 on a 7-point scale and 3.48 on a 5-point scale in the Daly and Dee study. Means were not available for the Harshbarger (1989) and Neumann and Finaly-Neumann (1990) measures of OC.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft for their insightful feedback.

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  1. Center for the Study of Higher & Postsecondary Education, University of Michigan School of Education, 610 East University Ave, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1259, USA

    Janet Lawrence, Molly Ott & Alli Bell

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  1. Janet Lawrence
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Correspondence to Janet Lawrence.

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Table 4 Factor derived variables, items, and reliabilities
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Lawrence, J., Ott, M. & Bell, A. Faculty Organizational Commitment and Citizenship. Res High Educ 53, 325–352 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-011-9230-7

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