The Impact of Organizational Culture on Commitment of Teachers in Private Sector of Higher Education

Organizational commitment is of real importance for the organizations in this corporate world. Researchers and theorists differentiate organizational commitment from job commitment, which refers to the involvement of a person into his profession, whereas organizational commitment refers to the intentions of employees to remain the part of an organization as a whole. Organizational commitment leads to retaining employees and attaining better levels of their performance. Reicher (1985), for example suggests that level of organizational commitment is visible from employee's behaviors. Moreover, Meyer, Allen, and Gellatly ( 1990) correlated the organizational commitment with the positive, cognitive and affective perspectives of attitudes of the employees. Best (1994), is of the view that commitment urges employees to do something which is morally true rather than personally beneficial. Schien (1985) defines organizational culture as a set of basic assumptions adapted as result of learning of a group to cope the internal and external problems. However, literature review of the subject reveals that organizational culture is a very broad term which has many dimensions like teamwork, communication, training and development, reward system, risk taking for creativity, and fairness of management practices etc. A large number of researchers believe that organizational culture is an important determinant of affective, continuance and normative commitment of the employees (Nystrom 1993; Wagner, 1995; Recardo & Jolly 1997; Lok & Crawford, 1999; Saeed & Hassan, 2000; Chow, 2001; Ooi & Arumugam, 2006; Samad, 2007; Yazdani & Yaghoubi, 2011).The private sector institutes of higher education in Punjab are facing the problem of high turnover of employees, in particular teaching faculty. The reason of this may be weaker organizational commitment. The provision of quality education to the students is a challenging task for private sector higher education institutes. These institutes allocate reasonable budgets for the training and development of their teachers. According to our survey, these institutes are mainlyengaged in arranging educational training workshops, giving rewards, and providing resources to raise the commitment level of their employees. Perhaps, this is insufficient because these kinds of practices cater only the affective dimension of organizational commitment, which is not enough to retain teaching faculty. In order to evoke higher commitment in employees, all the dimensions of organizational commitment must be rendered. Therefore, this study intends to compare the levels of important dimensions of organizational commitment and identify their effectiveness through literature. Further, this study measures the responses of teachers to different items of organizational culture in private sector of higher educational institutions in Punjab. Moreover, the present study also determines the effects of different components of organizational culture on different dimensions of organizational commitment and concludes important lessons out of it.Defining organizational culture is difficult because it is a complex phenomenon and has many dimensions associated with it. Many researchers define it in their own style according to their understandings and beliefs; however, no one can deny its importance for all the stakeholders of organizations in general. According to Hofstede (1991) belief, significance of an organization are strongly associated with the rituals and symbols which may support the organizational culture.Harrison (1993) suggested that power, role, achievement, and support are the important dimensions of organizational culture. They consider power as the injustice of access over resources, role as job description of employees and their task significance, achievement as the strategies of bringing people together to attain organizational goals, and support as shared and common vision and trust between organization and its employees. …