Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment of University Teachers in Public Sector of Pakistan

Study Objectives: The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of teachers’ satisfaction with job dimensions on perceived organizational commitment in public sector universities of Pakistan. In addition, the study aimed at exploring to what extent these teachers are committed to their universities and satisfied with different dimensions to their job. Research Design/Methodology: A survey-based descriptive research design was used. The study was carried on teaching faculty working in two public sector universities of Pakistan. About 650 survey questionnaires were distributed in October, 2009 by employing diverse modes of communication such as email, in person and post. Multiple follow ups yielded 331 statistically usable questionnaires. Stepwise regression analysis and one sample t-tests were used to confirming the research hypotheses. Results: The findings of the study indicated that the satisfaction with work-itself, quality of supervision and pay satisfaction had significant positive influence on organizational commitment of faculty members. They had high degree of organizational commitment and satisfaction with work-itself, supervision, salary, coworkers and opportunities for promotion. Research limitations/implications: The focus of the study was teachers working at public sectors universities in Pakistan only. Self-reported measures were used to measure job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Since respondents were from two public sector universities only so the findings cannot be generalized to faculty members of public sector universities in Pakistan. Practical implications: Considering the importance of university teachers’ organizational commitment and their effects on effectiveness of the universities, policy makers and academic administrators should take necessary International Journal of Business and Management www.ccsenet.org/ijbm 18 measures for the optimal provision of intrinsic and extrinsic job rewards to make their core workforce highly satisfied and committed. Originality/value: The relevant literature shows that university teachers’ commitment and job satisfaction is under-researched area particularly in the public sector institutions of higher learning in Pakistan. So, the current investigation has contributed to improve the understanding on significant issue. Besides, the study findings are discussed in perspective of practical implications in public sector universities.


Introduction
The study of behaviors within organizational setting has highlighted critical variables that are supportive or detrimental to the performance of workforce.This notion holds true while focusing on quality of human resources that is major factor which contribute significantly to the organizational success (Pohlman & Gardiner, 2000).Organizational commitment and Job satisfaction are widely studied factors in management literature (Bodla & Danish, 2009;Bodla & Naeem, 2009a;Bodla & Naeem, 2009b;Parker et al, 2005;Allen & Meyer, 1990) which are the precursors of employees' performance.These factors are even more important to study in academic institutions, especially universities which are the sources of human resources and sole responsible for educating the intellect of nations.Teacher is the central element in educational system holding various important responsibilities.The overall performance of universities depends upon their teachers and ultimately their level of commitment and job satisfaction.Thus understanding their behaviors and attitudes needs more attention in organizations.(Tsui & Cheng, 1999).This study was another effort which aimed at investigating the relationship of organizational commitment and job satisfaction among university faculty in public sector universities of Pakistan.Faculty members generally feel a sense of calling and responsibility to their work.The impact of the profession on work/non-work interactions, along with increased pressures of student affairs work, may be negatively influencing commitment to the profession.In an era of rapid change, knowledge capital must be retained in order for the organization to remain productive and responsive to the needs of its stakeholders (Bloch, 2001).The literature suggests that individuals become committed to organizations for a variety of reasons, including an affective attachment to the values of the organization, a realization of the costs involved with leaving the organization, and a sense of obligation to the organization (Meyer & Allen, 1997).Understanding of how teachers become satisfied and committed to their universities, and to what degree various factors contribute to their level of commitment, is really important to boosting up their performance.
Organizational commitment has also been measured in education sector.Some of these studies have focused on administrators and teachers in private and public secondary schools (Balay, 2000a), and principals' organizational commitment and school environmental robustness (Hart and Willower, 1994) the effect of principal behaviors on teacher commitment (O ¨ zden, 1997).However, to the best knowledge of the researchers, a few studies have addressed the role of different job dimensions on organizational commitment of the teachers particularly in the context of public sector universities in Pakistan.Thus, the current study aimed at determining impact of university teachers' satisfaction with job dimensions on organizational commitment in public sector of Pakistan.In addition, its objective was to exploring to what extent these teachers are committed to their universities and satisfied with different dimensions of their job.In this connection, important contribution has been made to advance the body of knowledge is on organizational commitment and job satisfaction of teachers employed by institutions of higher education in the developing country.

Organizational Commitment
Organization commitment refers to the employee's emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization.It is generally considered as three dimensional construct comprising of affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment (Boehman, 2006;Canipe, 2006;Turner and Chelladurai, 2005;Greenberg, 2005;Allen and Meyer, 1996;Karrasch, 2003).It is believed that affectively committed employees continue working with great devotion on voluntary basis, continuance commitment ensures that employees retain their organizational membership, however those who are normally committed usually feel obligation on their part to stay in the organization.While defining organizational commitment, Porter et al., (1974) defined it as "strong belief in and acceptance of the organizational goals and values, willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization, and a definite desire to maintain organizational membership".Jans (1989) has defined it as the extent that an employee accepts, internalizes, and perceives one's role based on organizational values and goals.Employees becomes committed to their organization when (a) they own and have conviction regarding the mission and values of the their organizations (b) they are mutually ready to exert their dedicated efforts in the achievement their organizational goals, and (c) they have intense desire to continue serving in their organizations (Robbins & Coulter, 2003;Jans, 1989;Hunt & Morgan, 1994;Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1982).According to Buchanan (1974); commitment is "a partisan or affective attachment to the aims and values of an organization, to one's role in relation with these aims and values and to an organization for its own sake".According to the cost-benefit approach; commitment is "a result of the perception of benefit associated with staying in and the perception of cost associated with leaving from an organization" (Kanter, 1968).According to the normative approach; commitment is "the aggregate internalized normative pressures to conduct in a manner which meets organizational objectives and interests" (Wiener, 1982).In this context, university teacher organizational commitment can be viewed as: (1) His or her firm belief in and acceptance of the university goals and values; (2) Readiness to exert dedicated efforts on behalf of university; and (3) Strong desire to sustain his or her university membership.
Employees who are committed to their organizations may easily accept and adhere to the organizational objectives and goals (Valentine et al., 2002).Individuals may become committed to an organization for many reasons: a person may stay with an organization because the organization's values, mission, and goals align with his/her own; another person may stay with the same organization because leaving may impact his/her prestige, benefits, or social networks; yet another may be committed to the organization due to a sense of obligation.Each of these three commitments -affective, continuance, and normative -are independent types of commitment experienced at different levels by all individuals of an organization (Meyer & Allen, 1997).

Job Satisfaction
The study of job satisfaction can be traced to Herzberg (1959) who theorized that job satisfaction is a function of motivators which contribute to job satisfaction and hygienes which lead to job dissatisfaction.Locke (1969) defined job satisfaction as an emotional state related to the positive or negative appraisal of job experiences.Dan Lortie (1975), in the classic sociological study of school teachers, addressed this issue and asserted that there are three types of rewards that meet job-related needs which teachers can look for in their careers: extrinsic, ancillary, and psychic (or intrinsic).Extrinsic rewards, in his view, deal with money income, prestige, and power over others and generally are "objective" since everyone experiences them.Ancillary rewards are objective and subjective because they refer to objective qualities of work that may be seen as rewards (e.g.women with children might deem their work schedule rewarding whereas men might not).Psychic rewards are seen as subjective appraisals made in the day-to-day routine of a teacher's work (e.g.value of student-teacher relationship) and are inconsistent from person to person (Lortie, 1975).Kreis and Brockopp (1986) suggested that job satisfaction "is related to self-perception of needs fulfillment through work".Pennington and Riley (1991) contemplated a view of job satisfaction as an external or internal value.In their view, a person's general assessment of how satisfied he/she is on the job is made according to an absolute frame of reference, while a person's assessment of level of satisfaction with individual job facets is based on a relative standard that is specific to the work context and that involves comparison with the situation of other employees.Weiss andCropanzano (1996, as cited in Thoms, Dose, andScott, 2002), contended that "job satisfaction represents a person's evaluation of his or her job and work context."Linda Evans (1997) defined teacher job satisfaction as a "state of mind determined by the extent to which the individual perceives his/her job-related needs being met".How are the many facets and factors of teacher job satisfaction measured?Zigarelli found a single, general measure of teacher satisfaction while Dinham argued that several separate measures are needed to assess all the factors that are mutually exclusive (Shann, 1998).Spector (1997) and Kreitner and Kinicki (2006) defined job satisfaction a global construct or as a constellation of different dimensions to which the employee reacts affectively.Job satisfaction can be understood as the way employees feel about their jobs and different aspects of their jobs.Spector (1997) says that a shift has taken place in the last 30 years of research from job satisfaction as need to job satisfaction as an attitudinal variable.For example, employees can have an attitude of being engaged with or disassociated from their organization.Job satisfaction as a psychological construct is defined by Dawes ( 2004) as having two components: a cognitive component (the perception that one's needs are being fulfilled), and an affective component (the feeling that accompanies the cognition).McNamara (1999) defines job satisfaction as: ". . .one's feelings or state of mind regarding the nature of their work.Job satisfaction can be influenced by a variety of factors, e.g. the quality of one's relationship with their supervisor, the quality of the physical environment in which they work, degree of the fulfillment of their work, etc".
As regards causal models, Kreitner and Kinicki (2006) identified five predominant causal models: need fulfillment (e.g.salary needs, family needs); discrepancies between what is expected and what actually happens; fulfillment of work values, equity or fairness of treatment; and dispositional (genetic) components where certain congenital personality traits lead to job satisfaction.

Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment in Institutions of Higher Education
A number of previous researchers have reported mixed findings on the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment.For instance, Curry, Wakefield, Price and Mueller (1986) found no significant relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment.However, other researchers (Busch et al., 1998;Chiu-Yueh, 2000;Feinstein & Vondraek, 2006;Freund, 2005;Mannheim et al., 1997) found that job satisfaction was a significant predictor of organizational commitment.Some researchers argued that job satisfaction reflects immediate affective reactions to the job while commitment to the organization develops more slowly after the individual forms more comprehensive valuations of the employing organization, its values, and expectations and one's own future in it.Therefore, job satisfaction is seen as one of the determinants of organizational commitment (Mannheim et al., 1997).It is thus expected that highly satisfied workers will be more committed to the organization.
Higher education is not immune to the problem of low job satisfaction; in fact, educational leaders have increased the number of research studies that try to identify factors that affect job satisfaction (Davis, 2001;Grace & Khalsa, 2003;Scarpinato, 2001;Trei, 2001;Truman, 1999).In addition to educational leaders and community leaders, other offices and stakeholders within higher education have concern about the financial impacts that job satisfaction and faculty departures have on the institution.Recently, an office of equal opportunity within a university developed focus groups to try to address job satisfaction for the recruitment and retention of qualified faculty (North Carolina State, 2001).The focus groups spent time discussing and evaluating the departure of key faculty members.These groups also found ways to retain these faculty members and limit the cost to the university.Research conducted in higher education has tried to identify specific variables and a relationship of these variables to faculty job satisfaction (Dee, 2002;VanderPutten & Wimsatt, 1999).These variables may range from organizational support and personal support to overall compensation packages.Dee examined a cross-section of faculty at an urban community college and found a strong negative relationship between organizational support for innovation and faculty job satisfaction, but the analysis did not find autonomy of work and communication with colleagues to be significant.If support from the university was low, then faculty members' dissatisfaction was high.In another cross-national study of faculty from 16 different countries, six variables were rated as significant factors for faculty job satisfaction: institutional affiliation, level of job strain, income, cooperative climate, locus of control, and geographic location (VanderPutten & Wimsatt, 1999).VanderPutten and Wimsatt also observed factors that did not predict faculty job satisfaction: instruction as a primary role, courses taught, institutional facilities, and quality of retirement benefits.
Researchers who conducted a faculty survey at a Massachusetts higher education institution identified professional development and salary packages as the most important job satisfaction factors (Grace & Khalsa, 2003).University support and employment options are variables that faculty members rate as highly valuable in consideration of job satisfaction factors in faculty positions at an institution.Another important variable within faculty job satisfaction is the role of department chairs (i.e., supervision) (Miller et al., 2001;Nienhuis, 1994).Miller et al. surveyed department chairs at a community college in the southeastern United States.The top three methods used by chairs for faculty job satisfaction were on-campus faculty development, mentoring programs, and workload flexibility; development was the most used, but mentoring was the most effective (Miller et al.).However, Miller et al. also listed the top three perceived challenges to job satisfaction as financial resources, faculty workload, and technology impact.Over 2,000 faculty members at a research institution were surveyed concerning the chair's involvement (Nienhuis).Over 73% of faculty listed appreciation for his/her work and the support from the chair as important factors in overall job satisfaction and the decision to leave or stay with the institution (Nienhuis).
Compensation packages are also a variable that may affect faculty job satisfaction and thus affect intentions of departure, as well as be a significant factor in retention rates.When compensation levels are higher, job satisfaction and retention rates for assistant and associate professors are also higher, and the magnitude of this effect grows larger as one moves from institutions with graduate programs to four-year undergraduate institutions to two-year institutions (Ehrenberg et al., 1990).Examining data collected by the American Association of University Professors, Ehrenberg and colleagues reported that if salaries were above the mean for similar institutions, retention rates of assistant professors were higher during the 20-year period 1970 through 1990.

Research Methodology
To validate the following research hypotheses, the research methodology is given hereunder: H1: Job facets satisfaction has significant impact on organizational commitment of the teachers/faculty working in public sector universities of Pakistan.H2: Teachers/faculty in public sector universities of Pakistan have high degree of satisfaction with different job facets/dimensions such as work-itself, supervision, pay, coworkers and promotion opportunities.
H3: Teachers/faculty in public sector universities of Pakistan experience high level of overall job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Survey questionnaires were distributed to six hundred and fifty faculty members (lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors and professors) working in two public sector universities of Pakistan.One of them was federally chartered university whereas other was provincially (Punjab) chartered.Multiple modes of communication such as email, post and in-person were used in order get optimal response rate from the study participants.Of 650 distributed questionnaires, overall usable response rate was about 48 per cent (331).Five point Likert scale was used to measure teachers' level of satisfaction with job and organizational commitment.Organizational commitment was measured by using six items measure developed for and used in General Social Survey (1991) to assess overall organizational commitment.The items were derived from, Linclon and Kalleberg's (1990) American-Japanese work commitment study (cited in Marsden et al., 1993).Overall Job Satisfaction was measured by using six items scale developed by Schriesheim and Tsui (1980).The scale included single items to assess level of satisfaction with the work itself, supervision, co-workers, pay, promotion opportunities, and job in general.Stepwise regression technique was used to determine which dimensions of the job had significant influence on teachers' organizational commitment.One sample t-test was employed to determine whether mean scores of job (dimensions) satisfaction and organizational commitment significant differ from median of their respective scales.

Results
Stepwise multiple regression analysis (table III) was used to determine the impact of different facets of job satisfaction on organizational commitment of teachers working in public sector universities of Pakistan.Descriptive statistics such as means and the standard deviations of the job satisfaction dimensions and teachers' commitment with their universities are given in table I. Inter-correlations matrix (table II) reflected that satisfaction with job dimensions and organizational commitment of the university teachers are linearly and significantly related with each other.Besides, it indicated that problem of multicollinearity did not exist because neither of the explanatory variable is highly associated with others separately.Since Durbin-Watson statistics hovered around two (i.e.1.96), thumb rule suggests that problem of auto correlation does not exist which means that the study observations are independent of one another.Homoscedasticity was checked by Spearman rank correlation test between the absolute value of the residuals and each of the explanatory variables (satisfaction with job dimensions) separately.The t-values were found to be statistically insignificant which indicated that the problem of heteroscedasticity did not exist.
The results of the step wise regression analysis (Table III) demonstrated that satisfaction of the university teachers with nature of the work, salary and quality of the supervision explained about 10 percent variance in their university commitment.Usefulness of the regression model was confirmed by F statistic (Table IV) which was found to be significant at alpha level of 0.001.The regression coefficients of explanatory variables such as satisfaction with work-itself, pay and supervision were found to significant (table V) which indicated that they had significant and positive impact on organizational commitment of the faculty members employed in public sector universities of Pakistan.The findings led to the confirmation of the research hypothesis 1.
The results of the one sample t-test (table VI) indicated that public university teachers had significantly higher degree of satisfaction with nature of work (Mean=3.96,SD=0.86),salary (Mean=3.19,SD=1.16),coworkers (Mean=3.86,SD=0.88),quality of supervision (Mean=3.66,SD=1.07) and opportunities of promotion (Mean=3.16,SD=1.14) which confirms the study hypothesis 2 that teachers/faculty in public sector universities of Pakistan have high degree of satisfaction with different job facets/dimensions.However, university teachers' satisfaction with work-itself was found to be highest (Mean=3.86,SD=0.86) but they were relatively less satisfied with promotion opportunities and salary (Mean=3.16,SD=1.14;Mean=3.19,SD=1.16 respectively).The mean scores of overall job satisfaction (Mean=3.57,SD=0.68) and organizational commitment (Mean=3.45,SD=0.58) of university teachers were found to be significantly higher than their respective scale median (i.e 3) which was in conformity with the hypothesis 3 that public sector universities faculty in Pakistan experience high level of overall job satisfaction and organizational commitment .

Implications for Academic Administrators and Researchers
The study findings present valuable understanding for policy makers regarding how to make faculty committed to organization to enhance their teaching and learning effectiveness, improved professional practices, and reduced turnover.Academic administrators could make their core workforce highly satisfied and committed by optimal provision of intrinsic and extrinsic job rewards.Future researchers should conduct longitudinal studies to establish causal relationship between study variables.It is advisable that representative sample of the faculty in public sector universities to be taken to ensuring external validity of the study findings.Perceived differences among public and private sector faculty members regarding affective, normative and continuance commitment and job facets satisfaction with underlying reasons could be probed.Findings of the study should be consulted while taking into consideration few limitations.Self-reported measures were used to measure job satisfaction and organizational commitment.Since respondents were from two public sector universities only so the findings cannot be generalized to faculty members of public sector universities in Pakistan.

Conclusions and Recommendations
The study intended not only to ascertain the influence of job facets satisfaction on organizational commitment of public sector university faculty in Pakistan but to determine their degree of commitment and satisfaction also.Based on the findings, it is concluded that nature of work, salary satisfaction and quality supervision are significant predictors of organizational commitment of the Pakistani public sector university faculty.It was also found out that they were highly satisfied with their supervisor, coworkers, compensation, work-itself and opportunities of advancement in their universities.Common sense confirms that higher education is not immune to the problem of teachers' low level of job satisfaction and organizational commitment which could result into unfavorable economic and non economic outcomes such as high exit turnover, reduced teaching effectiveness and intellectual development of the students.So policy makers and academic administrators should take necessary measures for the optimal provision of intrinsic and extrinsic job rewards to make their core workforce highly satisfied and committed to reap the benefits of improved motivation, performance and organizational citizenship behaviors.

Table I . Descriptive Statistics of Satisfaction with Job Dimensions and Organizational Commitment (n=313)
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