Organizational commitment and teaching styles among Chinese academics

Abstract

This research investigates the predictive power of organizational commitment for academics' teaching styles. Participants were 370 faculty members from 15 higher educational institutions in Beijing, mainland China. Results showed that academics' organizational commitments as measured by the Organizational Commitment Inventory (Ling, Fang, & Zhang, 2002) statistically significantly predicted their teaching styles as assessed by the Thinking Styles in Teaching Inventory (Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1993) over and above their gender, age, taught academic discipline, and academic rank. Findings have implications for academics in understanding their own teaching behaviors and career values and for university senior managers in their efforts to encourage creativity-generating teaching styles and to foster more adaptive types of organizational commitment through, among other strategies, promoting equity among academics.