AN EXAMINATION OF THREE WORK COMMITMENT CONCEPTS AND THEIR DETERMINANTS : ORGANISATIONAL COMMITMENT, PROFESSIONAL COMMITMENT AND JOB INVOLVEMENT AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL AND JUNIOR COLLEGE TEACHERS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

The concept of work commitment has been of interest to many researchers for a long time. The growth in commitment-related concepts and their accompanying measures may have led to a redundancy or an overlap in certain concepts commitment(Morrow, 1983). The present study aims of to work explore firstly, the extent to which three work commitment concepts are similar and secondly, their respective determinants. These three concepts are Organisational Commitment, Professional Commitment and Job Involvement. This research was based on 285 teachers in 8 Secondary schools and 2 Junior Colleges in Singapore. A questionnaire consisting of 8 sections was the main instrument used to collect data. SPSS-X was used to analyse the data and the main statistical techniques employed were factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. The results revealed that organisational commitment and professional commitment were more similar in their underlying constructs than job involvement. Organisational commitment and professional commitment were found to correlate rather highly at 0.7456. They both yielded a analyses. These two factors were "identification with the organisation/profession", and "desire to remain in the organisation/profession". In addition, from the regression analyses, it was found that the determinants of organisational commitment and professional commitment were similar to a great extent. Both were explained by job- and role-related variables. Job involvement had a different set of latent factor of which it was made up of. This was revealed by the factor analysis. Furthermore, the regression analyses showed that job involvement was affected by attitudinal, demographic and role-related variables. Thus on the whole, there seem to exist a certain degree of concept overlap of work commitment. The implications of the findings, recommendations for fostering work commitment, limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are also discussed.