variations in goal priorities of academic departments: a test of holland's theory

RESEARCH IN HIGHER EDUCATION, Vol. 2 © 1974 APS Publications, Inc.

VARIATIONS IN GOAL PRIORITIES OF ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS: A TEST OF HOLLAND'S THEORY*

John C. Smart and Gerald W. McLaughlin, Office of/nst i tut ional Re- search, Virginia Polytechnic Inst/tute and State University, B/acksburg, Virginia

This study investigated the relative importance which six groups of academic departments attached to five institutional goal dimensions. The six groups were formed on the basis of Holland's theory of vocational choice and the five goal dimensions were developed from a factor analysis of eleven goal statements. A stepwise, multiple discriminant analysis revealed significant differences between the six groups of academic departments on the Research-Graduate and Quality Education goal dimensions. These two dimensions produced significant differentiation in eleven of the fifteen possible group comparisons. The findings suggest tentatively that Holland's theory of vocational choice can assist in the interpretation of varying goal priorities within the academic community. Suggestions are offered to indicate how this theory might be employed by university administrators and in subsequent research on the administration of academic departments and the complex roles of their chairmen.

American higher educat ion is faced with a paradoxical s i tuation in which

compet ing social forces are demanding an expansion o f educat ional services in a

period character ized by restr icted financial resources. Growing anxie ty on cam-

pus about the relat ionship o f colleges and universit ies to these diverse social

forces has p roduced considerable reassessment o f the goals, values, and missions

of ins t i tu t ions o f higher learning. A corol lary dew~lopment to this increased

inst i tut ional in t rospect ion has been a renewed interest in the s t ructure, opera-

*This research represents a single aspect of a more comprehensive investigation of the administration of academic departments and the roles of department chairmen being conducted by the Office of Institutional Research, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in cooperation with the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. The authors wish to express their appreciation to James R. Montgomery and Alvin W. Smith for their suggestions and cooperation in the preparation of this manuscript.

377

378 Smart and McLaughlin

tions, and goals of academic departments as reflected in the efforts of Dressel et al. (1970), Hobbs and Anderson (1971), Baldridge et al. (1973), and Ryan (1973). These efforts have been seriously handicapped, however, by the absence of theory or conceptual frameworks in which departments could be arranged along one or more relevant dimensions. The consequence has often been the production of descriptive findings which lack theoretical continuity and interpretability. For example, the recent study of academic departments by Dressel et al. (1970) reported wide variation in the goal priorities of departments included in their sample, yet failed to investigate characteristics associated with these differences or to offer plausible hypotheses for their existence.

There is justification in the research literature, however, to support contentions that the variations which have been shown to exist in the goal priorities of academic departments might be related to the dominant personality types of faculty members who comprise these organizational units. For example, Holland (1958, 1966, and 1973) has proposed a theory of vocational choice which has as its basic assumption that vocational interests are in reality an expression of personality developed through the interaction of an individual's special heredity, experiences, and preferred activities, interests, competencies, and values. This developmental process creates "a characteristic disposition or personality type that is predisposed to exhibit characteristic behavior and to develop characteristic personality traits" which influence the individual's self-concepts, perception of the environment, values, achievement, performance, differential reaction to environmental rewards and stresses, preferences for specific occupations and occupational roles, coping styles, and personal traits (Holland, 1973, p. 12). From these assumptions, Holland has postulated a hexagonal model for the classification of most individuals into one of six basic personality types - Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. Individuals may be assigned to these personality categories by application of one or more of the following methods: scores on selected scales from interest and personality inven- tories, choice of vocation or field of training, and/or work history or preemploy- ment aspirations. Thorough descriptions of the preferences, competencies, self-perceptions, and values of individuals in the six personality categories are provided by Holland. For example, he asserts that the Realistic person tends to prefer activities that involve the explicit, ordered, or systematic manipulation of objects, machines, and animals. These preferences lead to the acquisition of manual, mechanical, agricultural, and technical competencies. Realistic people tend to have an aversion to educational or therapeutic activities and to be relatively deficient in their acquisition of social and educational competencies. Contrasted to the Realistic individual, the Social person tends to prefer activities that entail the manipulation of others and to dislike explicit, ordered, systematic activities associated with tools, materials, and machines. These preferences lead the Social person to the acquisition of human relation competencies

Goal Priorities of Academic Departments 379

and to a relative deficiency in manual and technical competencies (Holland, 1973, pp. 14, 16).

The underlying rationale of Holland's theory is that behavior is a function of both personality and the environment in which a person lives and works. It is therefore necessary to assess the environment as well as the personality in order to predict behavior efficiently. To permit such analyses, Holland has proposed six model environments which are analogous to the personality types. Thus, for each personality type there is a logically related environment (Realistic people dominate the Realistic environment, Social people dominate the Social environment, etc.) which characterizes the common social and physical environments in our culture. For example, the Realistic environment is composed primarily of people who are engaged in such occupational fields as agriculture, architecture, civil and mechanical engineering, forestry, and geography. These Realistic people tend to create an atmosphere or environment that is characterized by demands for concrete, physical, explicit tasks; duties which require immediate behavioral action; immediate reinforcement for the successful completion of a task; and little pressure for interpersonal skills, etc.

Holland's theory has been subjected to extensive empirical assessment on samples of college students by Elton and Rose (1970), Elton (1971), Morrow (1971), Walsh et al. (1972), and others whose findings tend to support his basic tenets. In addition, the theory contributed to the development of the Environ- mental Assessment Technique (EAT) which was designed to assess the environmental characteristics of colleges and universities. Research by Astin and Holland (1961) and Astin (1963) has demonstrated the reliability and concurrent and construct validity of the EAT. The theory has received rather minimal assessment, however, on samples of the adult population.

The present study represented a further assessment of Holland's theory and its ability to provide a useful theoretical context within which to interpret the apparent wide variation existing in the current goal priorities of academic departments. Specifically, the present study attempted to determine if there were significant differences in the amount of emphasis attached to various departmental goals when academic departments were classified according to Holland's criteria of model environments and whether such differences, if discovered, were consistent with the characteristics of each model environment as defined by Holland.

METHOD

A list of public universities which offered the doctorate and which had enroll- ments between 9,000 and 21,000 in 1972 was initially developed. From this list of 58 institutions, 38 were selected for possible participation in the study. Insti-


tutions from as many states as possible were selected to achieve geographic balance. The chief academic officer at each of the 38 universities was contacted to determine the willingness of his institution to participate in the study. Positive responses were received from 32 institutions.* A questionnaire containing eleven commonly assumed goals of academic departments was distributed to all 1,646 department chairmen at the 32 participating universities by the chief academic officer of each institution. Chairmen were asked to rate the current importance of each goal for their department on a five-point scale (1 = little or no importance; 5 = very much importance).

A total of 1,198 (73%) questionnaires were returned for analysis. The response rate by institution ranged from a low of 40% to a high of 100%. The first and third quartiles were 84% and 70%, respectively. The percentage of responses was independent of the regions in which the universities were located (northeast, southeast, central, northwest, southwest) as determined by the Kruskall-Wallis test of ranks (H = 3.58, df = 4) (Klugh, 1970). This study was based upon the responses of 1,037 male chairmen for whom complete data were available and whose departmental affiliations were included in the hexagonal model postulated by Holland et al. (1969).

Responses to the eleven goals were correlated and factor analyzed to determine salient goal orientation dimensions of the respondents. A principal axis analysis was performed with squared multiple correlation coefficients in the diag- onal. The number of factors to be rotated was determined by the scree test (Cattell, 1966), Bargmann's modification of Barlett's chi-square test. (Bargmann, 1957), and interpretability of the rotated factors. A varimax solution was then computed and used as a hypothesis matrix and three Promax iterations were computed to approximate oblique simple structure (Kaiser, 1958; Digman, 1967; Cureton, 1968; Rummel, 1970).

The resultant goal dimensions were then used as predictor variables in a stepwise, multiple discriminant analysis. Departments were assigned to the appropriate Holland categories. Table I presents a representative sample of departments assigned to each of the six Holland categories.

These six groups of academic departments - Realistic (n = 237), Investigative (n = 283), Artistic (n = 206), Social (n = 247), Enterprising (n = 44), and Con- ventional (n = 20) - constituted the dependent variables in the analysis.

RESULTS

The loadings for the eleven goal statements on each of the five goal dimensions are presented in Table II. Communalities ranged from .28 to .64 with a median of

*A list of participating universities is available upon request to the authors.


TABLE I. A Representative Sample of Departments Classified According to

Holland's Hexagonal Model a

Holland Categories Representative Departments

Realistic

Investigative

Artistic

Social

Enterprising

Conventional

Agronomy, Architecture, Civil Engineering, Forestry, Geography, Industrial Arts

Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Geology, Mathematics

Art, English, Journalism, Music, Philosophy, Speech-Drama

Elementary Education, History, Library Science, Psychology, Secondary Education, Sociology

Advertising, Business Management, Econom- ics, Marketing, Political Science, Public Administration

Accounting, Finance, Business Education

aSource: Holland et al. (1969, 6 11).

.50. Only those goals with a loading of -+ .30 were included in the dimension descriptions.

Inspection of the underlined loadings presented in Table II indicates the salient characteristics of the five goal dimensions which were labeled Optimal Ad- ministration, Research-Graduate, Maximum Discipline Status, Supportive Depart- mental Climate, and Quality Education, respectively. These five dimensions were converted to scores by combining responses of items having the underlined loadings on the reference vectors and dividing by the number of underlined loadings for each vector. For example, the score for Optimal Administration was the aver- age of the sum of responses to items three, four, and seven. The internal consistency measure of reliability for the five sets of scores ranged from .58 to .73, with a median of .66.

Table IIl presents the means, standard deviations, univariate F-ratios, and discriminant weights for the five predictor variables. The overall discriminating power of the predictor variables was examined by Bartlett'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-squa~e value of 102.52 which was statistically significant (p < .001) with 25 df. The first and second roots were also statistically significant, yielding chi-square values of 73.59 (df = 9; p < .001) and 23.02 (df= 7; p < .01), respectively.

The predictor variables are presented in Table Ill in the order in which they emerged in the stepwise analysis. That is, Research-Graduate accounted for the


TABLE II. Oblique Vector Structure of Departmental Goals a

Goal Statements Goal Dimensions b I II III IV V

1. Produce new knowledge through - . 04 .45 .07 - . 0 4 - .05 research

2. Graduate a well-versed student with a balanced education - . 0 6 - . 0 6 .07 - . 05 .41

3. Develop an efficient organization through the use of appropriate managerial decisions .38 - . 09 .06 - . 0 2 .07

4. Provide a direct service to other organizations in the university, community, and state .36 .03 - . 03 .07 - . 02

5. Improve the quality of the department relative to peer departments at other universities and within this institution .06 .02 .37 - . 03 - . 0 2

6. Encourage the personal and professional development of departmental faculty members .00 .01 .34 .08 .01

7. Maintain the goals and requirements of the central administration .34 .05 .06 .06 - .01

8. Develop and/or maintain an outstanding graduate program .02 .51 - . 0 4 .02 .05

9. Educate the student for a future career .08 .08 - . 09 .04 .39

10. Provide the faculty and staff with a congenial work environment .23 - . 03 - . 03 .48 - . 06

11. Maintain a spirit of inquiry and academic freedom - . 0 4 .02 .08 .44 .06

an = 1,037 bDimension Labels: I. Optimal Administration; II. Research-Graduate; III. Maximum Disci- pline Status; IV. Supportive Departmental Climate; V. Quality Education.

greatest portion of the variance between the groups, the addition of Quality Ed-

ucation to Research-Graduate provided the greatest reduction in the remaining unexplained variance, etc. Only those variables discussed in the following para- graph contributed significantly to the discrimination between academic depart-

Goal Priorities o f Academic Departments 383

ments classified into the six Holland categories. Research-Graduate scores differentiated Realistic and Investigative

departments from Artistic, Social, and Conventional departments; Social departments from Artistic and Conventional departments; and Conventional from Enterprising departments. The addition of Quality Education to Research-Grad- uate maintained the differences described above and further differentiated Realistic departments from Investigative, and Artistic departments from Conven- tional. Figure 1 presents Holland's hexagonal model and indicates the significant differences between the six groups of academic departments described above based upon the combined discrimination strength of these two predictor variables.

Conventional

Realistic Investigative

\

Artistic

\ \

\ \

Enterprising Social

Fig. 1. A hexagonal model [adopted from Holland et al. (3[969, p. 4)] for interpreting group differences produced by the research-graduate and quality education goal dimensions ( - - , p < .01 ; . . . , p< .05 ) .

Inspection of Fig. 1 reveals that these two predictor variables produced significant differentiation between eleven of the fifteen possible group comparisons. The combined strength of these two variables did not, however, differentiate Enterprising from either Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, or Social departments.

A more holistic presentation of these group differences is presented in Fig. 2 which plots the group means for the six departmental categories in discriminant space based upon the data in Table III.

The first discriminant function, plotted on the horizontal axis, derived its identity primarily from the high positive loading of Supportive Departmental


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Climate and strong negative loadings of Research-Graduate and Quality Educa- tion. Because of these characteristics it was labeled Faculty Climate Orientation. Departments that obtained high positive scores from this function tended to emphasize goals related to the provision of a congenial work environment for taculty, maintenance of a spirit of inquiry, and academic freedom in the department. On the other hand, departments that obtained high negative scores from this first function tended to place relatively more emphasis on goals related to the production of new knowledge through research, development and/or maintenance of an outstanding graduate program, and education of a student who has a balanced education and is prepared for a future career. The second discriminant function, plotted on the vertical axis, was labeled Localistic Orienta- tion because it derived its identity primarily from high positive loadings of Quality Education and Optimal Administration. Departments that obtained

386 Smart and MeLaughlin

high positive scores from this function tended to place relatively greater emphasis on goals related to the education of a well-versed student who has been prepared for a future career, efficient operation of the department, direct service to other organizational units, and maintenance of the goals and requirements of the central administration than departments that obtained negative scores from this function. Realistic and Investigative departments were most different from Artistic, Conventional, and Social departments on the Faculty Orientation function, while Investigative departments were most different from Realistic and Conventional departments on the Localistic Orientation function.

DISCUSSION

The absence of theory or conceptual frameworks to guide research on the structure, operations, and goals of academic departments has often resulted in the production of descriptive findings which lack overall consistency and interpretability. The present study represented an assessment of Holland's theory of vocational choice which appeared to offer a reasonable theoretical model for the analysis of academic departments. This theory assumes that there are six model environments which characterize the common social and physical environments in our culture and that the people who dominate each model environment possess relatively unique sets of motivations, attitudes, and preferences related to their personal and professional lives. The present study employed Holland's hexagonal model to classify departments into the appropriate model environment and attempted to determine if there were differences in the amount of emphasis each group of departments attached to various departmental goals and if these differences could be explained in terms of the underlying personality patterns associated with the model environments as specified by Holland's theoretical model.

Results of the present study indicated significant variation in the amount of emphasis currently attached to two goal dimensions by the six categories of academic departments. The tendency of Realistic (i.e., agronomy, civil engineering, geography) and Investigative (i.e., biology, chemical engineering, zoology) departments to earn a higher mean score on the Research-Graduate goal dimension indicated that they attached significantly greater importance to the production of new knowledge through research and the development and/or maintenance of an outstanding graduate program than Artistic (i.e., art, English, music), Social (i.e., elementary education, psychology, sociology), and Conven- tional (i.e., accounting, finance) departments. This greater emphasis upon Re- search-Graduate goals was also characteristic of Social departments when compared to Artistic and Conventional departments and Enterprising departments when compared to Conventional departments. The addition of the Quality Edu- cation goal dimension to Research-Graduate provided further differentiation

Goal Priorities o f A cademie Departments 387

between the Holland categories. The tendency of Realistic departments to earn a higher mean score on Quality Education than Investigative departments sug- gested that the former attached greater importance to efforts to produce well- versed graduates who have acquired both a balanced education and one which has provided adequate preparation for a future career. This tendency was also characteristic of Conventional departments when contrasted to Artistic departments. In summary, the use of Holland's classification scheme for academic departments resulted in significant differences on eleven of the fifteen possible group comparisons. All four non-significant group comparisons involved Enter- prising (i.e., business management, economics, marketing) departments.

Not only did this classification scheme result in numerous group differences, but the nature of those differences tended to be generally consistent with the underlying personality patterns associated with the model environments as specified by Holland, For example, Realistic and Investigative departments differed substantially from Artistic, Social, and Conventional departments on the Faculty Climate Orientation function (Fig. 2, horizontal axis). This implied that the former (Realistic and Investigative) tended to attach greater importance to goals related to student instruction, graduate programs, and research, while the latter (Artistic, Social, Conventional) tended to emphasize interpersonal goals related to the congenial work environment of the faculty, maintaining a spirit of inquiry and academic freedom. This basis of differentiation was generally consistent with the description of these model environments provided by Holland. For example, Holland describes the Realistic and Investigative model environments primarily in terms of their technical and scientific orientations, respectively. Neither environment is portrayed as possessing unusual human-relations competencies or interests in close interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, people in the Artistic, Social, and Conventional model environments are defined by Holland as either preferring or required to be more concerned with interpersonal matters. Realistic and Conventional departments are most different from Investigative departments on the Localistic Orientation function (Fig. 2, vertical axis) which contains goals of a pragmatic, app!ied nature (e.g., administrative efficiency, maintenance of policies of the central administration). Holland describes individuals in the Realistic and Conventional model environments, who earned relatively high scores on this function, as reflecting a preference for explicit, concrete tasks which require systematic, routine, and orderly activities. This is contrasted to the Investigative model environment in which people prefer more abstract and crea- tive activities related to the solution of complex problems which require persis- tence and originality. In summary, these primary differences in the current goal priorities of academic departments appear to be quite consistent with the underlying personality patterns associated with the six model environments as specified in Holland's theoretical model.


The results of the present study could offer useful assistance to university deans, provosts, and vice presidents in their efforts to understand and respond to the diverse and often conflicting positions and attitudes of faculty on sensitive governance issues. For example, the findings above provide further support for contentions that there is a great deal of diversity within institutions of higher learning and discourage consideration of the faculty as a single, like-minded group of professionals. Faculty in English departments (Artistic) are different from their colleagues in biology departments (Investigative), both of whom are different from faculty in psychology departments (Social). Thus, it would appear useful, when considering data on faculty, to consider seriously their departmental affiliation. This is not to imply, however, that there are as many different types of faculty within a university as there are academic departments or disciplines. Results of the present study would tend to provide partial support for Holland's assumption that there are six basic model environments in our culture and thus it might be appropriate to consider faculty attitudes and behaviors within the context of Holland's hexagonal model. In addition to further substantiating contentions aboutthe diversity within universities and providing partial support for Holland's theoretical model, the results presented above might provide university administrators with a tentative basis for understanding why such diversity exists within their faculties. Such diversity might well be an expression of underlying personality patterns of different educational-vocational groupings of faculty members as specified by Holland's theoretical model. Those university administrators who have an appreciation for the underlying reasons for such group differences would appear to be better equipped than others in efforts to provide the necessary continuity which the governance process needs in this difficult period.

The results of this study also appear to hold some promise for subsequent efforts to refine and extend the limited knowledge in existence related to the administration of academic departments and the almost mystical role of department chairmen. Dressel et al. (1970, p. 84) acknowledged that their findings pertaining to department chairmen were highly ambiguous and concluded that "the position of department chairman is vague, often misunderstood, and not clearly perceived." Subsequent research might profit from the use of Holland's hexagonal model as a basic construct in attempts to identify and explain the complex variation in the multidimensional roles which departmental chairmen perform. For example, results of the present study would tend to provide tentative support for speculations that chairmen in different types of departments (i.e., Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, etc.) might well employ different sources of influence in the performance of their duties, place different amounts of emphasis upon their various tasks, and derive different levels of job satisfaction from the performance of their various tasks. For example, Holland postulates that the Realistic type is most likely to employ pragmatic, masculine, and non- social influences, while the Social type will tend to be most sensitive to social,


humanitarian, and religious influences. Based upon the results of this study and earlier research which has provided support for the basic tenets of Holland's theory, it would appear that this theoretical model could be a useful construct for future research designed to reduce some of the confusion which presently exists about the administration of academic departments and the complex roles of their chairmen.

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Baldridge, J. V., Curtis, D. V., Ecker, G. P., and Riley, G. L. (1973). The impact of institutional size and complexity on faculty autonomy. Journal of Higher Education, 44: 532-547.

Bargmann, R. A. (1957). Study of independence and dependence in multivariate normal analysis. University of North Carolina, Institute of Statistics, Mimeo- graph Series No. 186.

Cattell, R. B. (1966). The scree test for the number of factors. Multivariate Behav- ioral Research, 1:245-276.

Cureton, E. E. (1968). A factor analysis of Project Talent tests and four other test batteries. Pittsburgh: American Institute of Research.

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Hobbs, W. C., and Anderson, G. L. (1971). The operation of academic departments. Management Science, 18 : 134-144.

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Klugh, H. E. (1970) "Statistics: The Essentials for Research." New York: John Wiley and Sons.

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Peterson, R. E. (1970). "The Crisis of Purpose: Definition and Uses of Institu- tional Goals." Princeton, New Jersey: Educational Testing Service.

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variations in goal priorities of academic departments: a test of holland's theory

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