Thursday, October 23, 2008
Satisfaction = Organizational Commitment?
My colleague Dr. Rick Froman runs our faculty opinion and climate surveys. He's been trying to explain to me that when we in administration think of satisfaction, we tend to think of "constituency needs" and so we tend to operate like politicians making campaign promises to various groups. But in practice, "satisfaction" is probably more closely connected to someone's basic (and original?) commitment to the organization (and its mission?) than anything else. That fact might indicate that we should be paying even more attention than we already do to "institutional fit" and compatibility with the mission of the place in the hiring process than to some of the professional competencies (what courses can this person cover) that we typically focus on. Southwest Airline's adage "hire for personality and train for skill" is probably an example of this type of thinking. Rick will probably tinker with our faculty satisfaction survey to see if we can get at this correlation more directly at JBU than we have in the past.