Date of Graduation
1999
Document Type
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
This study was designed to examine the relationship between faculty job satisfaction and the leadership frame use of that faculty member's immediate superior, usually the departmental chair, as perceived by the faculty member. One hundred and seventy-two faculty members who had no administrative title and who held a full-time position as a professor, associate professor, or assistant professor at any of the five West Virginia public, Southern Regional Education Board four-year VI institutions of higher education completed The Mohrman-Cooke-Mohrman Job Satisfaction Scale and Bolman and Deal's Leadership Orientations Instrument (other version). Descriptive statistics and one-way analyses of variance were used to analyze the data with respect to the research questions of this study. The chairs in this study most frequently used the human resource frame (47.7%) as their predominant leadership frame (highest frame score). The political and symbolic frames, together, only accounted for 23.3% of all the observations. Significant differences were found, at the .05 alpha level, between the predominant leadership frame of the chair and all three categories of the subordinate faculty member's job satisfaction. Faculty with chairs using a symbolic predominant frame expressed higher intrinsic and overall job satisfaction scores than that of faculty with chairs using any other predominant frame. In the case of extrinsic job satisfaction, both the symbolic and the human resource frames were superior to the structural frame while the symbolic frame also was superior to the political frame. This study also found significant differences between the number of frames that the chair used (frame score above the fiftieth percentile for the given frame) and all three categories of faculty job satisfaction. Faculty with chairs using multiple frames expressed higher intrinsic, extrinsic, and overall job satisfaction scores than that of faculty with chairs using either only one frame or no frame. The literature provides no clear answer to the question of whether or not an academic departmental chair in higher education influences faculty job satisfaction. This study indicates that both the chair's predominant leadership frame and the number of frames that the chair uses influence faculty job satisfaction.
Recommended Citation
Mathis, Saralyn Grenga, "The relationship of leadership frame use of departmental chairs to faculty job satisfaction as perceived by selected departmental faculty members." (1999). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 9373.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/9373