assessment of job satisfaction among college administrators

RESEARCH IN HIGHER EDUCATION Volume 3, pages 1-9 © 1975 APS Publications, Inc.

ASSESSMENT OF JOB SATISFACTION AMONG COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS

John C. Smart, Office of Institutional Research, Virginia Polytechnic institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061

Barry R. Morstain, Office of Academic Planning and Evaluation, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware

This study represented an initial effort to explore the potential of the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) as an instrument for the measurement of job satisfaction in institutions of higher learning. The JDI is a standardized measure of five dimensions of job satisfaction that has been used almost exclusively in non-educational organizations. A selected sample of college administrators was categorized into three groups based upon the degree of congruency between their preferred and perceived job responsibilities. The results of the study showed that those college administrators whose preferred and perceived job responsibilities were most congruent tended to earn a higher mean score on the Work Environment scale of the JDI than their colleagues whose preferred and perceived job responsibilities were less congruent. The implications.of this finding were discussed in terms of future research on job satisfaction in the academic community and between administrators in different types of organizational settings.

The study of job satisfaction and its correlates has been an area of active in-

vestigation since the initial monograph by Hoppock (1935). In the following decades, hundreds of studies were conducted employing "'tailor made" instru-

ments designed to "fit" the specific population being studied. Vroom (1964) was critical of this approach because of its failure to address the intricate problems of scaling, reliability, and validity. His challenge to develop standardized instruments applicable to multiple occupational settings was quickly accepted by Saleh (1964), Malinovsky and Barry (1965), Smith et al. (1969), and others. The availability of standardized measures stimulated further inquiry designed to assess the degree of job satisfaction in different occupational settings and level and to identify corre-

2 Smart and Morstain

lates associated most frequently with significantly higher/lower degrees of job satisfaction.

While these newer instruments have been used in a great variety of occupational settings, there has been a virtual omission of research related to the level of job satisfaction of college and university administrators. This failure might have been due to the industrial and business orientations of the investigators and/or the assumption that these instruments were not applicable to administrators in institutions of higher learning. However, in economic terms, higher education is one of the nation's largest "industries" with current expenditures in excess of $22.5 billion, representing 2.4% of the GNP (Bowen and Douglas, 1971). In addition, developments in the past decade have produced significant modifications in the approach to management of institutions of higher learning. The crisis of purpose noted by Peterson (1970) and increasing demands for institutional accountability (Hartnett, 1971) have fostered the growth of statewide coordinating agencies and increased usage of such business-oriented management tools as cost benefit analysis, computer simulation models, program planning and budgeting systems, management by objectives, and program evaluation and review techniques. While recognizing certain basic differences between corporations and institutions of higher learning, Besse (1973, p. 120) concludes that "the management techniques of business corporations have sufficient transferability to university operations to justify careful study by university administrators."

The continuing "managerial revolution in higher education," first noted by Rourke and Brooks (1966), with its emphasis on business management techniques has attracted to the academic community many individuals with "business-like" skills and interest who previously might not have considered a career in higher education. Glenny (1971) notes that these individuals are frequently clustered in offices of institutional research and analytical studies and, because of their significant influence on academic policy-making, he has labeled them the "anonymous leaders of higher institutions." Glenny asserts that the general public, political leaders, faculty, and students are misled in their belief that academic leadership rests with the president and governing board, lnstead, he asserts that those en- gaged in institutional research and analytical studies and those who make and manage the budgets are the individuals most responsible, internally, for the new leadership in both public and private institutions of higher learning.

The use of standardized job satisfaction instruments in institutions of higher learning appears more appropriate now than ever before given the changing cli- mate within which colleges and universities function, their adoption of various business-oriented management tools, and the attraction to the academic community of more individuals who possess skills and interests similar to managers in industrial and business organizations.

This study represents an initial effort to determine the usefulness of the Job

Job Satisfaction of College Administrators 3

Descriptive Index (JDI), a standardized measure of five dimensions of job satisfaction previously used in business, industrial, and governmental settings (Smith et al., 1969), in an academic environment. College administrators in the field of institutional research were selected as the target group for this investigation because of their suspected influence on academic policy-making and their tendency to employ the newer managerial techniques which have received increasing attention in colleges and universities. If the JDI is able to discriminate between varying levels of job satisfaction of these administrators, when classified by the degree of congruency between their preferred and perceived job responsi-- bilities, it would indicate that the JDI and other similarly constructed instruments might be as profitably utilized in educational settings as they previously have been in business and governmental organizations.

METHOD

The JD1, developed by Smith et al. (1969), was distributed to all 1048 members of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) in the spring of 1973. Respondents were also asked to rank-order the preferred (should be) and perceived (is) importance of ten responsibilities commonly associated with offices of institutional research (Tincher, 1970). These responsibilities encompassed such areas as data systems and computers, planning and coordination studies, budget and finances, space utilization, studies of students and curricula, and faculty activ- ity analyses. A total of 713 (68%) questionnaires were returned for analysis. Because of the diverse nature of the AIR membership, it was decided that only responses from individuals who: 1) were employed by colleges and universities,

and 2) were "full members" of the AIR would be included in the study. Elimina- tion of respondents who did not satisfy these criteria resulted in a sample size of 508.

Respondents were then categorized by the degree of congruency between the relative importance of their preferred and perceived job responsibilities, that is, those whose most important preferred responsibility w~s perceived to be either first or second in actual importance were placed in the first group; those whose first preferred responsibility was perceived to be third, fourth, or fifth in actual importance were placed in the second group; and those whose first preferred responsibility was ranked sixth through tenth in actual importance were placed in the third group. These three groups were respectively labeled Congruent (n = 332), Moderate (n = 107), and Discongruent (n = 69) administrators and com- prised the dependent variables in a stepwise multiple discriminant analysis. The independent variables in the analysis were the five JDI scale scores: Work environment; Supervision; Colleagues; Promotions; and Pay (Smith et al., 1969).


R ESU LTS

The means and standard deviations of the predictor variables and their univar- late and step-down F-values for Congruent, Moderate, and Discongruent administrators are presented in Table I. The discriminating power of the predictor variables was examined by Barlett's test (Rao, 1952) with P(k-1) degrees of freedom where p is the number of variables and k is the number of groups. The total discriminant analysis produced a chi-square value of 27.74 which was statistically significant (p < .01) with 10 df. Only the first root, accounting for 85% of the total dispersion, was statistically significant (p < .01).

The predictor variables are presented in Table I in the order in which they emer- ged in the stepwise analysis; that is, Work Environment (WE) accounted for most of the variance and the addition of Pay to WE provided the greatest reduction in the remaining unexplained variance, and so on. It can be seen from the univariate F- ratios in Table I that the three groups are significantly different (p < .01) on four of the five predictor variables. The discriminant analysis showed, however, that all significant variance between the groups was accounted for by one variable, WE, and that the addition of the remaining predictor variables did not contribute significantly to the reduction of the remaining unexplained variance. This can be seen from in- spection of the step-down F-ratios in Table I which represent a test of significance for each variable when the variance attributable to all preceding variables in the analysis has been removed (Bock and Haggard, 1968). Thus, WE is the only predictor variable which added significantly to the discrimination between Con- gruent, Moderate, and Discongment administrators. WE scores differentiated Congruent administrators from their Moderate and Discongruent colleagues but had no effect in distinguishing between the two latter groups.

The effectiveness of the predictor variables in classifying the 503 college administrators is presented in Table II, the correct classification being indicated by the underlined numbers on the diagonal.

The overall effectiveness of prediction for the three groups was 59%, with Con- gruent administrators having the most nearly accurate prediction (66%).

DISCUSSION

Research on job satisfaction and its correlates has been restricted almost exlusive- ly to employees in non-educational organizations. The few studies which have been conducted in institutions of higher learning have been focused on faculty members (Eckert and Stecklein, 1961 ; Caplow and McGee, 1965;Parsons and Platt, 1968)

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and have utilized unstructured interviews and "tailor-made" questionnaires. While such studies are a useful beginning, they do not represent a sound basis for the development of a theory of job satisfaction and motivation within the academic community or provide the foundation for comparative studies between administrators in institutions of higher learning and their peers in business, indus- try, and government. Recent changes in managerial practices and techniques suggest that standardized research instruments designed to assess varying attri- butes of job satisfaction in non-educational settings, su& as tile JDI, might have unexplored potential when administered to members of college and university administrative staffs.

The results of this study indicated that when college administrators in the field of institutional research were classified by the degree of congruency between their preferred and perceived job responsibilities, Congruent administrators earned significantly higher scores on the WE scale of the JDI than their Moderate and Discongru- ent colleagues. The tendency of Congruent administrators to earn a significant!y higher mean score on the WE scale suggests that they tend to find their work to be more challenging, fascinating, and satisfying than their Moderate and Discongruent peers. Congruent administrators are not as inclined to perceive their activities as frustrating, routine, and boring. Instead, they perceive their work as providing an outlet for their creative energies, useful to their institutions, respected by their colleagues within the institutions, and providing a sense of accomplishment in their lives.

These findings are not particularly surprising since it was postulated prior to the initiation of the study that the activities which the respondents were asked to rank-order in terms of their preferred and perceived importance were most closely associated with the WE scale of the JDI. Therefore, the hypothesis that those initiation of the study that the activities which the respondents were asked to rank- order in terms of their preferred and perceived importance were most closely associated with the WE scale of tile JDI. Therefore, the hypothesis that those respondents whose preferred and perceived responsibilities were most congruent would tend to obtain a higher mean score on the WE scale was confirmed and these results tended to provide partial support for the discriminant validity of the JDI in college and university environments; that is, the JDI was able to distinguish different levels of job satisfaction when college administrators were classified by the degree of congruence between their preferred and perceived job responsibilities.

Inferences that may be made from these results are restricted by the fact that they were obtained from the responses of a single set of college and university administrators. The ability to generalize these results to other sets of edcuational administrators (e.g., presidents, academic deans, business managers, deans of students, etc.) with confidence must wait until replication of this study on other samples of college and university administrators. However, the tentative support which these findings provide for the further use of the JDI in institutions of higher


learning should not be minimized. Until contrary evidence is presented, these findings suggest that interpretable results may be obtained from the use of the JDI with members of college and university administrative staffs. The results from these in- vestigations could be of substantial interest to researchers.

For example, if the results of this study are confirmed by further investigation, it would permit the comparison of the job satisfaction of college and university administrators with their peers in non-educational organizations to determine if individuals in similar positions in business, industrial, governmental, and educational organizations possess similar levels of job satisfaction and motivation; that is, do chief executive officers, business managers, and personnel directors in all types of organizations derive the same degree of satisfaction and motivation from their jobs? Are such factors as age, sex, length of service, salary, and level of educational prep- aration equally associated with a given degree of job satisfaction in all types of organizations or are they differentially related for each organizational type (i.e., is salary more highly related to job satisfaction in business as opposed to educational organizations)?

Given the unexplored nature of job satisfaction within the academic community, a multitude of questions confront the interested scholar. For example, are there differences in the level of job satisfaction between individuals in different areas of college and university administration? In other words, are academic deans more satisfied than deans of students; business managers more satisfied than admissions officers, and so on? Are there differences in levels of job satisfaction for a single set of administrators in different types of institutions? For example, are academic deans in large universities more satisfied than their peers in liberal arts colleges or community colleges?

Consistentlfindings to these and other questions have considerable potential for assisting individuals who are considering careers in college and university administration and to the development of a more informed theory of the psychology of preferences, attitudes, and motivation. They might also have important implications for the mental health of individuals in institutions of higher learning and for the development of more humane management policies and procedures.

REFERENCES

Besse, R. M. (1973). A comparison of the university with the corporation. In James A. Perkins (Ed.),"The University as an Organization." New York: McGraw-Hill.

Bock, R. D. and Haggard, E. A. (1968). The use of multivariate analysis of variance in behavioral research. In D. K. Whitla (Ed.) "Handbook of Measure- ment and Assessment in Behavioral Sciences." Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Bowen, H. R. and Douglas, G. K. (1971). "Efficiency in Liberal Education." New York: McGraw-Hill.

Caplow, T. and McGee, R. J. (1965). "The Academic Marketplace." Garden City, New York: Doubleday.


Eckert, R. E. and Stecklein, J. E. (1961). "Job Motivations and Satisfactions of Col- lege Teachers." Washington: U.S. Office of Education.

Glenny, L. A. (1971). The anonymous leaders of higher institutions. Paper presented at the Eleventh Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, Denver, Colorado.

Hartnett, R. T. (1971). "'Accountability in Higher Education." Princeton: College Entrance Examination Board.

Hoppock, R. (1935). "Job Satisfaction." New York: Harper and Brothers. Malinovsky, M. R. and Barry, J. R. (1965). Determinants of work attitudes. Journal

of Applied Psychology, 49:446-451. Parsons, T. and Platt, G. M. (1968). "'The American Academic Professions: A Pitot

Study." Cambridge: Harvard University. Peterson, R. E. (1970). "The Crisis of Purpose: Definition and Uses of Institutional

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York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Rourke, F. E. and Brooks, G. W. (1966). "'The Managerial Revolution in Higher Edu-

Education." Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Saleh, S. D. (1964). A study of attitude change in the pre-retirement period. Journal

of Applied Psychology, 48:310-312. Smith, P. C., Kendall, L. M., and Hulin, C. L. (1969). "The Measurement of Satis-

faction in Work and Retirement." Chicago: Rand McNally. Tincher, W. A. (1970). "A Study of the Members of the Association for Institutional

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assessment of job satisfaction among college administrators

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