organizational effectiveness and mission orientations of two-year colleges

Research in Higher Education, Vol. 34, No. 4, 1993

ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS AND MISSION ORIENTATIONS OF TWO-YEAR COLLEGES

John C. Smart and Russell E. Hamm

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This study investigated the applicability of Cameron's (1978, 1983) nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness in a nationally representative sample of two-year colleges and examined differences in those dimensions for colleges that had decidedly different mission orientations. The results strongly support the applicability of these nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness in two-year colleges and indicate that the effectiveness of these institutions varies significantly depending on their mission orientation. From a global perspective, it appears that two-year colleges with tripartite and dual missions are the most and least effective, respectively, while those with a singular mission occupy a middle position. The implications of these findings for research on the effectiveness of two-year colleges and for initiatives to enhance the effectiveness of their management practices and institutional performance are discussed.

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A spate of recent national reports have focused renewed attention on the organizational effectiveness of American colleges and universities in terms of student learning and management practices (National Endowment for the Hu- manities, 1984; National Institute of Education, 1984; Association of American Colleges, 1985). Efforts to address these important concerns have encountered serious questions about the conceptual meaning of effectiveness and how it is to be empirically defined and measured (Tan, 1986; Baird, 1988).

The issue of organizational effectiveness is particularly acute in two-year colleges for at least three reasons. First, they comprise the single targest sector of American higher education with over 1,200 institutions serving more than five million students; their effectiveness is crucial to the overall effectiveness of

Jobn C. Smart, College of Education (M/C 147), University of Illinois at Chicago, P.O. Box 4348, Chicago, IL 60680; Russell E. Hamm, Dean of Instruction, College of Lake County, Grays- lake, IL 60030-1198.

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Boston, November 1991.

489

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490 MISSION ORIENTATIONS

American higher education by virtue of size considerations alone (Pincus and Archer, 1989). Second, traditional measures of effectiveness for four-year colleges and universities (e.g., student selectivity, scholarly reputations of faculty) have limited applicability in this critical sector of American higher education. This absence of appropriate effectiveness measures has created a virtual void of research on the effectiveness of two-year institutions (Nunley and Breneman, 1988). Third, two-year colleges have been experiencing a historical identity crisis regarding the appropriate balance among multiple missions (Richardson and Leslie, 1980; Brint and Karabel, 1989). Attention to organizational effectiveness has been overshadowed by practicality in the midst of ongoing debates regarding the relative importance of transfer/college parallel, technical/career, adult/continuing, and remedial/developmental education programs.

Two purposes guided the design of the current study. The first purpose was to assess the applicability of Cameron's (1978) nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness in a nationally representative sample of two-year institutions. These dimensions, and the associated measurement instrument, have evolved from over a decade of concerted research effort. Numerous studies have shown that these effectiveness dimensions have broad utility in the study of the effectiveness of four-year colleges and universities (e.g., Cameron, 1981, 1986; Ewell, 1989). Their appropriateness for the study of two-year colleges, however, is unknown and constitutes the first purpose of the current study.

The second purpose of this study was to examine variation in the perceptions of organizational effectiveness among two-year colleges that have decidedly different missions. Both Chaffee (1984) and Ewell (1989) found that the effectiveness of four-year institutions is highly correlated with their espoused missions. Chaffee (1984) noted that the acquisition of well-articulated and strongly held notions of organizational mission was essential to the development of effective "turnaround" strategies in small liberal arts colleges. Similarly, Ewell (1989) found an uncommonly strong "connection between strongly held and articulated missions and perceptions of institutional performance" (p. 133). Re- search on the relationship between the missions of two-year institutions and their effectiveness seems especially important given the polemic debate over the past two decades regarding the appropriate balance among the college parallel/academic transfer, technical/vocational, developmental/remedial, and adult/ continuing education functions of this important sector of American higher education (Richardson and Leslie, 1980).

Daugherty (1988) provided a useful dichotomy to characterize the respective views of two-year college critics and supporters based on intellectual disagree- ments regarding the relative priority of the transfer/college parallel and technical/career missions of community colleges. Daugherty (1988) labeled those

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critical of two-year colleges as the class-reproduction school. The principal thesis of this school is that these institutions actively work to maintain the existing social order through attempting to "cool out students" (i.e., directing students to terminal vocational or associate-degree programs rather than encour- aging and supporting their desires to transfer to four-year institutions). Zwer- ling (1976) noted, for example, that the two-year college plays an essential role in maintaining the existing social and economic order and "has become just one more barrier put between the poor and the disenfranchised and the decent re- spectable stake in the social system they seek" (p. ×vii). One consequence of this orientation noted by critics is that two-year colleges have become domi- nated by excessive vocationalism that further erodes the transfer rates of their students to four-year institutions (Brint and Karabel, 1989; Grubb, 1990; Pin- cus, 1980).

Daugherty (1988) refers to two-year college supporters as the functionalist school. The principal thesis of this school maintains that the creation of two- year colleges has facilitated the entry into higher education of many students who might not have otherwise gone to college. This thesis is abundantly clear in the writings of Cohen and Brawer (1989), Gleazer (1968), and Medsker and Tillery (1971) who contended that the founding of a two-year college in a conamunity is associated with an increase in the percentage of recent high school graduates in that community who are continuing their education. Cohen and Brawer (1989) and Knoll and Medsker (1964) also provided evidence that two-year college transfer students performed adequately at the four-year institutions to which they transferred.

The above discussion identifies the tension that has existed for over two decades between the transfer and vocational missions of two-year colleges. In attempting to carve out a niche for themselves in higher education, two-year institutions have also embraced the mission of providing adult and continuing education programs. Gleazer (1974) urged two-year colleges to "place more emphasis on 'community' than 'college'," (p. 8), and the 1974-75 mission statement of the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges (AACJC) heeded this advice by urging these institutions to provide leadership in "community-based, performance-oriented postsecondary education" (AACJC, 1976). The intervening years have witnessed burgeoning adult and continuing education enrollments in two-year colleges (Richardson and Leslie, 1980).

Individual two-year colleges across the country differentially embrace these three distinct missions: some manifest a tripartite mission, others adopt a dual mission that blends two of the three primary missions, and some have a singular emphasis on only one of the missions. While the põlemic debate about the "proper role" of two-year institutions, or the "proper blending" of multiple missions, continues unabated, there is little empirical evidence about the extent


to which the missions of two-year colleges are related to their overall organizational effectiveness. An examination of this relationship constitutes the over- arching purpose of the present study.

RESEARCH PROCEDURES

Sample

The sample was selected using a two-stage stratified random sample design. The first stage was based on a random selection of public two-year colleges stratified according to size using the 1990 membership directory of the AACJC. Thirty institutions were randomly selected and their college catalogues were inspected to obtain the names of administrators and faculty members. The second stage was based on a sample of all full-time administrators and a random sample of faculty members. Approximately twice as many faculty were sam- pled as administrators at each college. A total of 1,332 faculty and administrators in these 30 community colleges were surveyed and 698 responses (54%) were received. Thirty-six surveys were deleted due to excessive missing data, leaving a total of 662 (51.3%) responses used in the analyses described below.

Variables

The survey instrument included 36 items regarding the effectiveness of two- year colleges. Thirty-two of the items were taken from the instrument, An As- sessment of the Performance of Colleges and Universities, developed by Kim S. Cameron, Ellen E. Chaffee, William Tierney, and associates at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS). There were minor word changes on five of the original 32 items to make them more appropriate for use with two-year institutions. Four additional items were added from Cameron's (1978) original instrument. These 36 items were intended to measure nine distinct dimensions of organizational effectiveness in colleges and universities.

Respondents also provided information on the missions of their colleges in terms of the proportion of students enrolled in (1) transfer and college parallel programs, (2) technical and career programs, and (3) adult and continuing programs. ' The means for each of the 30 colleges on each of the three mission items were computed and their profiles were inspected to examine patterns of similarity and differences. Three patterns of organizational mission emerged. The respondents at 10 institutions indicated that their institutions had a clear singular mission that emphasized technical and career programs; respondents at 10 other institutions indicated that their institutions had a dual mission that emphasized both technical/career and transfer/college parallel programs; and

SMART AND HAMM 493

respondents at eight other two-year colleges indicated that their institutions had a tripartite mission with a balanced emphasis on technical/career, transfer/college parallel, and adult/continuing programs. Two institutions had atypical mission profiles and were deleted from the remaining analyses; one had a singular emphasis on transfer/college parallel programs and the second had a dual emphasis on technical/career and adult/continuing programs.

The proportion of students enrolled in each of the three types of programs for each of the three pattems of organizational mission described above clearly supports the three patterns. For example, 62 percent of all students enrolled in the 10 institutions with a singular mission are in technical and career programs with the remaining 38 percent evenly divided between transfer/college parallel and adult/continuing education programs, the 10 institutions with a dual mission have a balanced distribution of students enrolled in technical/career (36%) and transfer/college parallel (44%) programs, and student enrollments in the eight two-year colleges with a tripartite mission are rather evenly balanced among technical/career (37%), transfer/college parallel (36%), and adult/continuing (27%) programs. In addition, there was strong agreement between faculty and administrators at all three types of two-year colleges in terms of their mission orientation of their institution. No significant difference emerged between faculty and administrators on any of the three mission emphasis variables.

Respondents also provided information on the extent to which their colleges were experiencing financial difficulties. The level of financial difficulty experienced by the college was measured by two items to which respondents indicated their agreement on a four-point Likert scale (1 = "Strongly disagree"; 4 = "Strongly agree"). The two items were: "Financial resources have become more difficult to obtain in the last year" and "Revenue for the college, adjusted for inflation, decreased over the last year." These two items were combined (coefficient alpha = .84) to create a composite scale of the level of financial difficulty experienced at the respective colleges during the past year. The size of all institutions (i.e., headcount enrollment) was obtained from the 1990 AACJC membership directory.

Analyses

Two sets of analyses were performed. First, factor analytic procedures were employed on the 36 effectiveness items and scale reliability estimates (coefficient alpha) were computed for the 9 organizational effectiveness dimensions. The purpose of these analyses was to determine whether the 36 items actually measured in a reliable manner the nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness in t~vo-year institutions as has been shown in four-year colleges and universities (Cameron, 1978, 1981). Second, multivariate analysis of covariance


(MANCOVA) procedures were used to examine variation in the nine organizational effectiveness measures among two-year colleges with decidedly different missions. A one-way MANCOVA design was employed. The independent variable was mission emphasis (singular mission with an emphasis on technical/career education; dual mission with an ernphasis on transfer/college parallel and technical/career education; and tripartite mission with a balanced emphasis on transfer/college parallel, technical/career, and adult/continuing education). The dependent variables were the nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness derived from the preceding analysis. The covariates were two measures reflecting the size of the college and the extent to which the college has experienced financial difficulties in the past year. These covariates were included in the analysis given extant findings that the effectiveness of colleges and universities is negatively related to their size and to the magnitude of financial problems they experience (Cameron, Kim, and Whetten, 1987; Hamm, 1989; Smart, 1989).

RESULTS

The results of the factor analysis provided strong support for the overall dimensionality of the nine effectiveness scales proposed by Cameron (1978). Eight factors had eigenvalues greater than 1.00; they were extracted and sub- jected to a varimax rotation. The only substantial variation from the nine effectiveness dimensions proposed by Cameron (1978) was the combined loading of the items on the System Openness and Community Interaction and the Ability to Acquire Resources scales on a common factor. Inspection of the loadings of the 36 items on the eight rotated factors revealed that 31 of the 36 items (86%) "loaded" on the proper factor. Given the comparability of these findings to the proposed dimensions and the desire for continuity with earlier research, it was decided to retain the original nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness proposed by Cämeron (1978) and contained in An Assessment of the Perfor- mance of Colleges and Universities. The median coefficient alpha for the 9 effectiveness scales was .74, ranging from a low of .65 (Student Academic Development) to a high of .85 (Organizational Health). Table 1 presents definitions of and reliability estimates for the nine organizational effectiveness scales used in this study, while Table 2 presents the average within-dimension correlations for each item, the mean correlation of each item with all items outside its own effectiveness dimension, and the correlations among the nine scales.

Inspection of Table 2 reveals but moderate correlations among the nine effectiveness dimensions. The mean correlation among the nine dimensions is .33, and ranges from a low of .06 (Organizational Health and Student Career Devel- opment) to a high of .58 (Organizational Health and Faculty and Administrator Employment Satisfaction). The comparison of the average within-dimension

SMART AND HAMM

TABLE 1. Definitions and Reliability Estimates of Organizational Effectiveness Dimensions

495

Student Educational Satisfaction (SES): The extent of satisfaction of students with their educational experiences at the institution. Reliability= .80

Student Academic Development (SAD): The extent of academic attainment, growth, and progress made by students at the institution, and the opportunities provided by the institution for academic growth. Reliability = .65

Student Career Deveiopment (SCD): The extent of occupational or vocational development of students and the opportunities for occupational development provided by the institution. Reliability = .67

Student Personal Development (SPD): The extent of student development in noncar- eer, nonacademic areas, that is, socially, culturally, emotionally, and the opportunities provided by the institution for personal development. Reliability = .69

Faculty and Administrator Employment Satisfaction (FAES): The satisfaction of faculty members and administrators with their employment and jobs at the institution. Reliability = . 80

Professional Development and Quality of the Faeulty (PDQF): The extent of professional attainment and development of the faculty, and the amount of stimulation to- ward professional development provided by the institution. Reliability = .74

System Openness and Community lnteraction (SOCI): The emphasis placed on the interaction with, adaptation to, and service in, the institution's external environment. Reliability = . 72

Ability to Acquire Resources (AAR): The extent to which the institution acquires resources from the external environment including finances, high-quality students and faculty, research support, and political legitimacy. Reliability = .77

Organizational Health (OH): The extent of smooth functioning of the institution in terms of its processes and operations, including the benevolence and vitality of the institution. Reliability = .85

correlations for each item and the mean correlations of each item with all items outside its own effectiveness dimension provides strong support for the discrim- inant validity of the items since the within-dimension mean correlations were substantially higher than the mean outside correlations for items comprising all nine effectiveness dimensions (see Table 2). This finding demonstrates that the dimensions are composed of items with high internal consistency and that they are distinguishable from one another.

The MANCOVA test of the within-cells regression effect was statistically significant (F = 6.82; p < .001); thus, respondents' scores on the nine effectiveness dimensions were adjusted to control for differences associated with the covariates (i.e., organizational size and financial difficulties). The institutional mission's main effect was statistically significant (F = 14.38, p < .001), indi- cating that there are broad differences in the respondents' perceptions of organi-


TABLE 2. Correlations Among Organizational Effectiveness Scales

Mean ltem Correlation

lnside Outside SES SAD SCD SPD FAES PDFQ SOCI AAR OH

SES .75 .31 1.00 SAD .61 .29 .36 1.00 SCD .62 .14 .19 .25 1.00 SPD .76 .25 .33 .36 .10 1.00 FAES .70 .33 .37 .35 .13 .25 PDFQ .62 .23 .31 .42 .22 .29 SOCI .43 ,17 .41 .39 .12 .51 AAR .48 .27 .21 .42 .07 .37 OH .51 .28 .50 .40 .06 .40

1.00 .34 1.00 .31 .42 1.00 .40 .37 .50 1.00 .58 .40 .47 .38 1.00

Note: See Table I for full names of the organizational effectiveness scales.

zational effectiveness across the three groups of two-year colleges when con-

trolling for differences in their size and the degree of financial difficulty they are experiencing. Table 3 presents the adjusted means and standard deviations

for the three groups of colleges on the nine organizational effectiveness dimensions.

TABLE 3. Adjusted Means and Standard Deviations

Organizational Effectiveness Scales Mission Category Univariate

Singular Dual Tripartite F-ratio

Student Educational Satisfaction

Student Academic Development

Student Career Development

Student Personal Development

Faculty & Administrator Employment Satisfaction

Professional Development & Quality of Faculty

System Openness & Community Inter- action

Ability to Acquire Resources

Organizational Health

--.02 .00 .14 2.12 (.86) (.80) (.76) .03 -- .07 .14 3.69"

(.80) (.73) (.74) .51 --.26 --.17 108.94"**

(.45) (.59) (.66) --.07 --.11 .25 12.62"**

(.91) (.71) (.68) .03 - . 0 4 .12 2.30

(.78) (.73) (.80) .04 - . 11 .09 4.50**

(.76) (.70) (.79) - .03 - . 12 .23 10.60"**

(.89) (.74) (.73) .06 - . 1 4 .19 9.34***

(.88) (.80) (.79) - .08 .03 .06 1.94

(.80) (.68) (.70)

Note: Standard deviations are in parentheses. *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001

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The main effect produced significant differences on six effectiveness scales. As might be anticipated, those colleges with a singular emphasis on technieal/ career programs have a significantly higher adjusted mean score on Student Career Development (p < .001) than the two other groups, and those with a tripartite mission (balanced emphasis on all three programs) have a significantly higher adjusted mean score on Student Academic Development (p < .05), Stu- dent Personal Development (p < .001), and System Openness & Community Interaction (p < .001) than the two other groups. There are significant differences (p < .001) among all three groups on the Ability to Acquire Resources scale with tripartite mission colleges having the highest adjusted mean score, followed by those with a singular mission and those with a dual mission (emphasis on technical/career and transfer/college parallel programs). Tripartite and singular-mission colleges have significantly (p < .01) higher adjusted mean scores on the Professional Development & Quality of Faculty scale than those with a dual mission.

DISCUSSION

The findings of this study clearly support the appropriateness of the use of the nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness proposed initially by Cam- eron (1978) in efforts to understand and to improve the management and institutional performance of two-year colleges. This appropriateness is evident in at least four respects: (1) the dimensionality of the instrument is generally con- firmed by the factor analysis solutions, (2) intercorrelations among the resulting scales are sufficiently low to suggest that they are, in fact, measuring distinct, though related, aspects of effectiveness, (3) the reliability estimates for the nine effectiveness scales are sufficiently strong to give reasonable confidence in findings obtained, and (4) the construct validity of the instrument is supported through findings of differences in the organizational effectiveness of two-year institutions with decidedly different missions.

Difficulties in defining the construct space of organizational effectiveness have led some to call for a moratorium on traditional studies of organizational effectiveness (Goodman, Atkin, and Schoorman, 1983). This difficulty is particularly acute in all sectors of American higher education given many of the inherent characteristics of colleges and universities (e.g., loose coupling, absence of measurable goals, ability to ignore major constituencies, minimal connection between resources and products). Cameron (1986) notes that the six most prevalent methods of evaluating effectiveness in higher education over the past two decades, as identified by Webster (1981), are appropriate "only to 50 or so of the best known institutions in the country," and thus "most institutions of higher education are left without obvious criteria to assess their organizational effectiveness" (p. 89). This serious deficiency has been alleviated in


large measure by Cameron's (1978) initial formulation of nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness for four-year institutions and his extensive findings supporting the validity of the dimensions (Cameron, 1986), and their relation- ships to organizational life cycles (Quinn and Cameron, 1983;), organizational culture (Cameron and Ettington, 1989), faculty unionism (Cameron, 1985), and overcoming the effects of organizational decline (Cameron, 1983; Cameron, Whetten, and Kim, 1987).

The cumulative results of this theoretically guided set of inquiries are ex- ceedingly helpful to our conceptual understanding of organizational effectiveness and its correlates in four-year institutions and to the efforts by campus leaders to improve managerial and institutional performance. For example, Cameron (1978) initially suggested that the instrument used in assessing these nine dimensions of organizational effectiveness can be "the first step in a fine- grained analysis of effectiveness on the institutional level in identifying relevant effectiveness dimensions" (pp. 625-626). In subsequent research, Cameron has shown that the most powerful factors associated with both static and dynamic assessments of effectiveness are the strategic orientations of campus officials, and that multifaceted managerial strategies are necessary since different strategic emphases are associated with different dimensions of effectiveness (Cam- eron, 1986). Thus, bis findings support the conclusion that there is no "one best way" to manage complex academic institutions; rather, management strategies should be tailored to match the effectiveness dimension(s) targeted for improve- ment. It would seem apparent, therefore, that the analyses presented here might engender similar strategies by administrators at different types of two-year colleges in order to improve their organizational effectiveness.

It is in this context that the findings of this study supporting the appropriateness of the nine dimensions of organizational effectivess and the psychometric properties of the associated measurement instrument for two-year institutions take on great value, for they provide two-year college officials with the capacity to take the first step in fine-grained analyses of the effectiveness of their institutions to identify particular areas of strengths and weaknesses. The results of such an initial assessment of organizational performance can provide the basis for a subsequent more in-depth formulation of strategic management orientations designed to enhance existing strengths and to improve institutional performance in areas considered to be deficient.

The results of the present study stand in direct opposition to contentions that "applying the same criteria in evaluating community colleges that have been used in evaluating four-year colleges certainly is not appropriate" (Nunley and Breneman, 1988, p. 64). They clearly suggest just the opposite; that is to say, two-year and four-year colleges share a common understanding of the operational definition of organizational effectiveness as manifested in the nine dimensions of effectiveness proposed initially by Cameron (1978). This is not

SMART AND HAMM 499

meant to convey that all measures of effectiveness commonly used to assess four-year institutions (e.g., selectivity, citation counts of faculty members, etc.) are appticable in two-year institutions. What is intended is that the use of these nine dimensions in subsequent research on the organizational effectiveness of two-year colleges has the potential to yield the same useful results in our efforts to understand and to improve the management and performance of this vital sector of American higher education.

The comparison of the effectiveness of two-year colleges that embrace different patterns of organizational mission represents but a first step in this direction. Nunley and Breneman (1988) note that "questions about mission and inad- equate mission definition have made comprehensive evaluations . . . difficult" (p. 65) in these institutions. The present study offers a threefold operational definition of the missions of two-year institutions that is grounded in nearly two decades of debate (Richardson and Leslie, 1980; Brint and Karabel, 1989; Grubb, 1990) and, more importantly, suggests that two-year colleges classified according to this typology differ dramatically in the level and nature of their performance on six of the nine organizational effectiveness dimensions.

From a global perspective, it appears that two-year colleges with tripartite and dual missions are the most and the least effective, respectively, when con- trolling for size and financial attributes. Those with a tripartite mission have a significantly higher adjusted mean score on four of the six dimensions where significant differences were found (i.e., Student Academic Development, Stu- dent Personal Development, System Openness & Community Interaction, and Ability to Acquire Resources), while those with a dual mission have a significantly lower adjusted mean score on all six dimensions. Two-year colleges with a singular mission devoted to technical and career programs occupy a middle position in that they have a significantly higher adjusted mean score on Student Career Development and the second highest adjusted mean score on the other five effectiveness scales that differentiated among the three groups.

These findings suggest that the complexity of the mission adopted by two- year colleges is not the significant consideration in their effectiveness, for there is not a linear relationship between mission complexity (e.g., singular, dual, tripartite) and effectiveness. Similarly, the apparent success of those with a tripartite mission suggests that no single mission or conflict between any two missions inhibits effectiveness. Rather, the findings may suggest that organizational effectiveness in two-year institutions is enhanced most by the capacity of campus leaders to embrace a comprehensive mission that incorporates the three traditional purposes of this critical sector of American higher education. Failing to do so, the next best strategy appears to be a mission that focuses on a single important mission. The least successful alternative appears to be the middle-of- the-road approach that emphasizes two of the three traditional missions, but denies the legitimacy of the third.


Obviously, these conclusions are tentative, given the cross-sectional research design of the present study and the fact that some typological possibilities are absent in the colleges surveyed (e.g., those with a singular mission on transfer/ college parallel or adult/continuing programs and those with a dual mission on transfer/college parallel and adult/continuing programs). Similarly, it is recog- nized that the missions of many two-year colleges are mandated by state agen- cies and thus they do not have local discretion to freely select from alternative mission possibilities. For example, 8 of the 10 singular-mission two-year colleges in this study are technical colleges whose missions are restricted by state mandate to technical and career programs, while all of the dual or tripartite mission colleges are either junior or community colleges and presumably have broader discretion in their relative emphasis on alternative missions.

It is also instructive to examine those aspects of organizational effectiveness that fall to differentiate among the three groups of two-year colleges: Student Educational Satisfaction, Faculty & Administrator Employment Satisfaction, Organizational Health. The substantive nature of these three scales suggests that effectiveness in terms of the satisfaction of internal constituencies and the smooth internal functioning of the colleges' processes and operations are not related to their mission orientation. Most clearly, these three dimensions of organizational effectiveness focus on internal processes rather than interactions with the external environment.

A potentially fruitful approach for future research might be to integrate the threefold mission typology of this study with measures of mission distinctiveness (i.e., the degree to which the college mission is perceived as special or at least distinguishable from others) and the extent to which there is a high level of internal agreement on the espoused mission of the college. Ewell (1989) reported that measures of mission distinctiveness "appeared to be most related to student satisfaction and nonacademic development," while measures of mission agreement "seem most related to career development and to academic achievement" (p. 133) in his study of 320 four-year institutions using the scales from An Assessment of the Performance of Colleges and Universities. Clearly, the substantive nature of community college missions, as included in this study, and perceptions of the distinctiveness of and the level of agreement regarding those missions provide a solid basis for subsequent research on the relationship between the missions of two-year college and the effectiveness of their management practices and institutional performance.

NOTE

1. The survey instrument did not ask respondents to indicate the proportion of their colleges' total enrollments in remedial and developmental programs. This is especially unfortunate given the burgeoning growth in such programs and heated debates about the appropriateness of such offefings becoming a critical component in two-year colleges (McGrath and Spear, 1991).

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Receivcd March 7, 1992.

Note: The editorial review of this manuscript was under the direction of Cam- eron Fincher, Associate Editor.

organizational effectiveness and mission orientations of two-year colleges

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