Contributions of placement, retraining and motivation to teachers' job commitment: structural equation modelling of the linkages

Abstract

This study used a latent variable structural equation modelling to quantify how staff motivation, placement and retraining partially and grossly affect teachers' job commitment across three areas. The research was quantitative, and the design adopted was the ex-post facto. This study included 500 school managers from 204 public secondary schools in Cross River State, Nigeria. Data were gathered using the ''staff placement, retraining and motivation questionnaire'' (SPRMQ) and the ''job commitment questionnaire (JCQ).'' Both instruments were assessed for face and content validity using domain and psychometric experts. The instruments' construct validity was determined using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses based on the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation technique. Acceptable indices were obtained for the test of sampling adequacy and Bartlett's test of sphericity. Loadings of items for each latent factor in the study varied from .55 to .98. The reliability for internal consistency was also established using Cronbach's alpha with coefficients ranging from .93 to .97. Our findings indicate that retraining is an essential predictor of staff affective commitment (AC), normative commitment (NC) and continuance commitment (CC). However, placement and motivation did not significantly contribute to employees' job commitment across the AC, CC, and NC aspects. Cumulatively, the three upstream variables explained less than 15% of the variance in the three dimensions of job commitment, respectively. Based on these results, discussions were made with implications for research, theory, and practice.

Keywords

• CFA
• Commitment
• EFA
• Factor analysis
• Latent variable
• Prediction