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Adjunct faculty are an increasingly important employee group in higher education, especially at community colleges. Community colleges rely on these faculty to teach more than 75% of the courses offered each semester. Contrary to their necessity in community colleges is their treatment at those institutions, often being referred to as “invisible”, “under-valued” and “ostracized”. Studies have looked at many strategies to improve this treatment of adjunct faculty with the hopes of retaining more. This quantitative study examined the effect of mentoring and career stage on job satisfaction and organizational commitment of adjunct faculty teaching at community colleges. The participants were recruited from three community colleges, each having an established, formal mentoring program for adjunct faculty. Job satisfaction was measured using the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) and organizational commitment was measured using the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ). A two-way factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to test the main effect of mentoring and career stage on both organizational commitment scores and job satisfaction scores. Additionally, two non-parametric tests, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis, were used to determine effect of mentoring and career stage on extrinsic job satisfaction respectively. While the data from the sample of 166 adjunct faculty were found to not be significant, themes from the data suggest more in-depth research is needed on this employee group to better understand how to support them.
Advisor: | Mackesy, Blake |
Commitee: | Letwinsky, Karim, Reinert, Paul, Swope, Betsy, Wasmanski, Stephanie |
School: | Wilkes University |
Department: | Educational Leadership |
School Location: | United States -- Pennsylvania |
Source: | DAI-A 80/09(E), Dissertation Abstracts International |
Source Type: | DISSERTATION |
Subjects: | Community college education, Educational leadership, Higher education |
Keywords: | Adjunct faculty, Community college, Higher education, Job satisfaction, Mentoring, Organizational commitment |
Publication Number: | 13814021 |
ISBN: | 978-1-392-15705-3 |