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ABSTRACT
With the purpose of determining the levels of lecturers' organizational commitment (affective, normative and continuance) based on gender, employment type, marital status, and academic rank, the current research has been performed in Technical and Vocational Colleges in four provinces of Fars, Khuzestan, Boushehr, and Kohgilouyeh and Boyerahmad in Iran. A survey-based descriptive research with the analysis of mean, standard deviation, frequency and percent and four t-tests were utilized to measure organizational commitment of 295 lecturers. The relevant literature shows little studies pertaining lecturers' commitment of higher learning institutions in Iran. Considering the importance of lecturers' organizational commitment; educational leaders, policy makers and academic administrators should take necessary measures to make their core workforce highly committed. This study has contributions to fill the gap of theoretical and empirical knowledge and improve understanding of organizational commitment issue.
Keywords: Affective, Continuance, Normative, Overall Organizational Commitment, Technical and Vocational Colleges, Iran
INTRODUCTION:
Organizational commitment has been the focus of attention both in management literature and research for the past four decades. According to Allen and Meyer (1996, 1997), Armstrong (2001), Cohen (2007), employee commitment is not limited to national boundaries or particular organizations, but is a universal issue and needs further research. It plays a key role in attaching the employees to the organization in such a way that the more organizational commitment is deeper, the longer employees continue to stay with the organization (Allen & Meyer, 1996; Cohen, 2007; Martin, 2007; Meyer, Becker, & Vandenberghe, 2004). Knowing that management strategies dependent on control are not suitable to manage educational institutions; administrators try to perform strategies based on commitment to manage such organizations (Martin, 2007; Winter & Jackson, 2006).
In addition, one of the most important factors of success in higher education institutions is lecturers' commitment (Aminbidokhti & Salehpoor, 2007; Bhatnagar, 2007; Davoodipoor, Ahancheyan, & Rezvani, 2008; Hossaini, Amirtash, & Mozafari, 2005). Lecturing is one of the professions that need high commitment; the workload is heavy, the role is broad and the lecturers are committed and responsible in educating the students. Teachers strong in organizational commitment find it easy to be interested in whatever they are doing and can involve themselves unconditionally. Without commitment, some may even leave the profession and in a case of no...