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Determinants of Turnover Intent in Higher Education: The Case of International and U.S. Faculty

In spite of the increase in the number of the international academic workforce and their potential benefits, international status has been relatively under-studied in Public Management and Higher Education literature in comparison with studies of age, gender, and race. Given these realities, the present study identifies characteristics of internal and external variables that influence international and U.S. faculty turnover intentions in a large public South Eastern research university.
To understand the variations in short-term and long-term turnover levels while controlling for various demographic, structural, and external variables, eight Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression analysis were performed using turnover intentions as the dependent variables. Distributive justice has the strongest negative effect on short-term turnover, and communication openness has the strongest negative effect on long-term turnover. After controlling for job satisfaction and organizational commitment, the effect of communication openness on short-term turnover and the effect of distributive justice on long-term turnover are not statistically significant. This suggests that communication openness and distributive justice might affect turnover through job satisfaction and/or organizational commitment. Job satisfaction has the strongest negative effect on short-term turnover and organizational commitment has the strongest negative effect on long-term turnover after controlling for internal and external variables.
In addition, this study aims to analyze the differences in internal and external factors that impact faculty turnover by international status. In achieving this aim, international faculty were compared to the U.S. faculty on the afore-mentioned internal and external factors that were shown in the literature to impact turnover. The result shows that structural variables such as autonomy, communication openness, and procedural justice play a bigger part in how international faculty evaluate their career with the current university than it does for U.S. faculty. On the contrary, kinship ties and job opportunity have stronger effects on U.S. faculty turnover than international faculty turnover. The implications of this study and areas of future opportunities are discussed.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-4722
Date01 January 2015
CreatorsPark, Jaehee
PublisherVCU Scholars Compass
Source SetsVirginia Commonwealth University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceTheses and Dissertations
Rights© The Author

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