Determinants of Organizational Commitment among Academic Staff in Kenya’s Public and Private Universities

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to investigate into the determinants of commitment among the academic staff in the public and private universities in Kenya. The five independent variables investigated included workplace spirituality, work-life practices,employee direct participation in decision making, employee non-monetary benefits and terms of employment. Five research hypotheses were formulated in line with the objectives.In the literature review, theoretical framework was based on the organizational support theory, the social exchange theoryand the theory of psychological ownership. In the conceptual framework the five predictors formed the independent variables with employees’ level of commitment making the dependent variable. This surveystudy was a form of a cross-sectional study to establish whether significant associations among variables existed at some point in time. Both descriptive and correlational research designs were used. The study targeted all the academic staff in the public and private universities in Kenya and therefore a comparison of the two sectors was undertaken.Stratified sampling was used where sixteenuniversities wereselected followed by simple random sampling to select both representative department and staff from the selected departments. Data for the study was collected by administering a 65-itemquestionnaire to a sample of 347academic staff. During the analysis descriptive statistics were used. Correlation wasmeasured using Karl Pearson’s coefficient.Correlation analysis was also undertaken on independent and dependent variables. A multiple regression model for determining staff commitmentwas also developed and used to assess the joint effect of all independent variables on the dependent variable.Hypothesis testing of regressioncoefficients was used since the hypothesis involved relationships between variables. The study usedt-test and F-test for that purpose. The findings were that there was a strong positive linear relationship between the independent variables workplace spiritualityand employment terms and organizational commitment. The relationship between work-life balance practices and organizational commitment was also positive but weak. Employee participation in decision making and employee non-monetary benefits both had a moderate linear relationship with organizational commitment. The t-test and F-test for all the variables led to the rejection of the null hypotheses and therefore the study concluded that there was a positive linear relationship between workplace spirituality, work-life practices,employee direct participation in decision making, employee benefits and employment terms and the dependent variable organizational commitment.This study recommended that university administrators should maintain a spiritual workplace so as to develop a whole person (mind, body, and also spirit). Governments need to support and assist universities, companies and other organizations whether public or private to implement and introduce policies for work-life balance. The study also recommended that employee participation in decision making should be increased especially in the private universities. Governments should make effort to enact laws that will make it compulsory for every employer to provide some form of benefits to their employees especially in the private sector where the application of these benefits in low. Universities should come up with policies and strategies to ensure that the high number of non-permanent employees in the universities is reduced.