Examining structural relationship between organizational commitments and motivation an application on teachers: Çay province example

Organizational commitment defines the belonging and incorporation level of a person towards his organization. It is also explained as feeling the benefits of the organization more than his own. On the other hand, motivation is generally known as a guided power. It is an instinct power that forces a person to start a work, lets him to move, improves the efficiency, directs him, and powers the behavior. It is a force that starts the needed behavior to supply the requirement. In this study it is tried to model the relation among the organizational commitment and motivation of the teachers. Organizational commitments of the teachers are analyzed in three dimensions, which are emotional commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment, and motivations are analyzed in two dimensions as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the levels of organizational commitment and motivation as well as the relationship between teachers' organizational commitment and motivation within state schools in Çay province Afyonkarahisar. The relationships between the organizational commitment and motivation are examined via Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). "Organizational Commitment Questionnaire" and the "Motivation Questionnaire" which are developed by Meyer and Allen (1997), Mottaz (1985), Brislin et al. (2005) and Mahaney ve Lederer (2006) are used to obtain the data set Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is a comprehensive statistical method used in testing hypotheses about causal relationships among observed and unobserved (latent) variables and has proved useful in solving the problems in formulating theoretical constructions. Its function has found to be better than other multivariate statistics techniques which include multiple regression, path analysis and factor analysis. Other statistics techniques could not take them into consideration due to the interaction effects among depended and independent variables. SEM also can expand the explanatory ability and statistical efficiency for model testing with a single comprehensive method. SEM is a method for representing, estimating and testing a theoretical network of linear relations between variables. The results of the study indicated that the level of emotional commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment improves if the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation levels of the teachers are improved. On the other hand extrinsic motivation is more effective than the intrinsic motivation on the organizational commitments of the teachers and there is a positive and strong correlation among the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation levels of the teachers. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of teachers are both found the most effective on the continuance commitments. While continuance commitment of the teachers positively effects the normative commitments, normative commitments also have a positive effect on their emotional commitments. The other results showed that while the motivation levels of the single teachers are more than the married ones, organizational commitment levels of them are lower. Age which is also related with the term of employment has a positive effect on both the organizational commitment and motivation levels of the teachers. While the organizational commitment levels of the primary school teachers are greater than the others, motivation levels of the secondary school teachers found the highest. One of the remarkable results of the study is also that the organizational commitment and motivation levels of the teachers working in a village are greater than the teachers working in the county and city center.