The relationship between job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment of Academic Staffs: A study of selected Ethiopian Public Universities

Job satisfaction and organizational commitment of academic staffs is one of the major factors for improving quality of education, teachers and students performance with in higher education settings. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to investigate the relationship and effect of Job satisfaction on faculty's organizational commitment at five selected Ethiopian public universities. Accordingly, primary data was collected from 402 faculty members using self-administered survey questionnaire. The instruments used to collect data were adapted from Spector's (1977) 9 facets measures of job satisfaction and Meyer and Allen (1997) revised organizational commitment questionnaire. By design, the study is both descriptive and quantitative correlational research using a cross-sectional survey method. In this study, descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and multiple linear regression analysis were employed to analyse quantitative data. The regression model disclosed that the variance on organizational commitment was explained by the facets of academic staffs ‘Job satisfaction. From the nine facets, the study revealed that pay, fringe benefit, Promotion decision, nature of job (teaching) and communication are found to be the major predictor of organizational commitment at the five selected public universities in Ethiopia.

The finding of this study concludes that Faculty's job satisfaction has a statistically significant predictive positive effect on organizational commitment. The major factors that lead faculties to job dissatisfaction are inadequate payment (salary), insufficient fringe benefits, lack of academic freedom, discrediting merit based practices, inadequate resources, high bureaucracy, centralized administration system, denying promotion opportunities for hardworking academic staff members, lack of recognition and respect, problem of empowerment and inadequate scholarship opportunities. The results of this study shows that there is positive and significant relationship between job satisfaction facets and organizational commitment of academic staffs of five selected public Universities in Ethiopia. However, job satisfaction levels of academic staffs were low and minimum level of organizational commitment has been indicated in the study. As a result, to retain well experienced, qualified and high calibre academicians, Universities should increase the level of job satisfaction which in turn results in improved level of academic staffs ’organizational commitment to their universities.