Organizational Commitment and Work Engagement as a Facilitator for Sustaining Higher Education Professionals (Only Abstract)

Abstract

The rationale for the current study was explained in the light of the challenges faced by Indian higher education system. Given the issues of below expected quality of teaching and learning, lack of quality assurance and poor accountability of teaching staff in higher education institutions, it was found essential to investigate the status of work engagement and organizational commitment amongst higher education professionals. The review of literature revealed the need to conduct a comprehensive study of work engagement of faculty members in the higher education sector, as very few such studies existed in the Indian context. The relationship of work engagement with organizational commitment was found to be a subject of research gap and interest. Based on these, measures for enhancement of work engagement were sought to be identified, the present study was undertaken with the objective to study the relationship between work engagement and organization commitment of higher education institution faculty members. A cross-sectional descriptive study was designed using the quota sampling technique for drawing a fixed number of faculty members from each of the four broad faculty work areas namely Commerce and Business Management (CBM), Science, Engineering and Technology (SET), Applied Medical Sciences (AMS) and Education and Humanities (EHUM) from public and private higher education institutions. Work Engagement Scale developed by Schaufeli et al. (2006) and organizational Commitment scale developed by Saks (2006) were used. The statistical analysis approach hierarchical multivariate regression was employed and analysis was done by using SPSS version 22.0. The results revealed that work engagement is positively associated with organizational commitment. A long tenure could be an outcome of a match between organization’s result orientation with employees’ personal and professional orientation. Hence, it implies that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) must design ingenious ways to map the two orientations so that they can retain faculty members for long tenures and capitalize upon their work engagement.