Relationship between Goal-Orientation Culture and Job Commitment among Lecturers in Public Universities in Kenya

One of the management strategies which guides people and organizations to focus their efforts towards achievement of individual and organizational objectives is goal orientation. While it has been documented by previous researchers that learning goal as well as performance goal orientations are significant in influencing employee behaviour, how the same influence job commitment among university lecturers is still a matter of conjecture. This knowledge would be significant especially in the context of public universities in Kenya where missing lecture sessions are rampant on one hand, while more employers prefer graduates from Technical, Industrial and Vocational Enterprise Training (TIVET) institutions than university graduates, on the other hand. This study explored the influence of goal orientation culture on job commitment among lecturers at the University of Nairobi and South Eastern University. The hypothesis that: Organizational goal orientation culture does not have significant relationship with job commitment among lecturers at the Nairobi University and South Eastern Kenya University was tested. Self-determination theory (SDT) of motivation originated by Ryan and Deci was used to guide the study. Descriptive survey design was used on a target population of 56191 lecturers, Deans and students from which 377 was derived as a sample size via Krejcie and Morgan’s (1970) Table. Closed and open-ended questionnaire was used for data collection, and regressions (at 0.05 level of significance) as well as thematic analyses used respectively to analyse quantitative and qualitative data. Findings revealed that 86.1% of changes in job commitment among the lecturers is attributed to goal-oriented culture (R 2 =0.861), with goals related to timelines for examination result submission and number of units taught strictly adhered to. It is concluded that matching of the university and lecturers’ goals related to teaching timelines among others significantly enhance lecturers’ job commitment. Professional development opportunities for lecturers should be enhanced to improve their capacities, while challenges facing lecturers in enhancing their job commitment need further exploration.


Introduction
The contemporary business environment across the globe has become more competitive than before hence the need to understand various aspects of work dynamics capable of enhancing productivity is imperative (Li & Tsai, 2020).Researchers in business management field (Bedarkar & Pandita, 2018; Durie & Beshir, 2018; Lamm, Powell & Lamm, 2020) are interested in deciphering the psychological, managerial, and physical processes, which drive people's performance.This is particularly crucial in contexts in which individuals fail to achieve their goals or are faced with difficult situation even when they are working hard (Bailey et al., 2017).Increasing challenges and complexity of the external environment accelerate psychological development of employees to a different level of self-consciousness (Ali, Khan, Latif, Shabir and Ali, 2021).Such self-consciousness has consistently been described as goal orientation (Dierdorff, Surface, Harman, Ellington and Watson, 2020).Cai and Wen (2018) defines Goal Orientation (GO) as a self-development belief that an employee perceives, understands and responds to the environment that fulfills his/her goals.Goal orientation is an intrinsic feature that is highly relevant to work behavior, work attitude, and job performance.For achievement of organizational goals to be actualized, a high level of ability and effort must be put forth by an individual (Zhen, Cao & Wang, 2022).Stasielowicz (2018) argues that examination of goal relevant behaviour should be anchored upon the understanding of underlying commitment mechanisms that motivate individuals to perform.While motivation and GO has been widely discussed, its role on organizational or job commitment is less studied.
In their definition, Soetjipto et al (2021) describes a goal as the object of a specific action: something an individual aims at achieving by performing specific actions.According to Akinlabi, Dogo and Asikhia (2021), goals direct individuals' attention toward goal-relevant actions and create a framework for the interpretation of and reaction to related events and outcomes.As one of the pioneer of GO, Carol Dweck was mainly concerned with examining children in a school setting (Zhen et al, 2022).Dweck observed that children with mastery-oriented response patterns responded to failure with solution-oriented selfinstructions, maintained a positive effect, and their subsequent performance on the task improved (Shamin, Cang and Yu, 2017).Dweck proposed two types of goals adhered to in achievement situations: learning goals and performance goals.Those with learning goals focus on improving their abilities and are not upset with failing (a mastery-oriented approach), whereas those with performance goals place a high degree of importance in being successful and maintaining positive judgments of their abilities (Zhen et al, 2022).Goal orientation is often evaluated via internal and external criteria since it emanates from motivational viewpoints (Stasielowicz, 2018).Internal standards (self-improvement or task mastery) are used for learning goals and external standards are adopted in the context of performance goals (use external norms to evaluate own performance) (Cai & Wen, 2018).Furthermore, people with performance goals may wish to prove their competence (prove performance goal orientation or PPGO) and avoid showing incompetence to others (avoid performance goal orientation or APGO).In contrast, people with learning goals want to show competence and avoid showing incompetence to themselves (Ramnarain & Ramaila, 2016).People with a mastery goals orientation are not concerned about how many mistakes they make or how they appear to others but view mistakes as learning opportunities and help (Zhen et al, 2022).As a result, they are not afraid of failing because failing does not threaten their self-esteem (Li & Tsai, 2020).Considerable research has been conducted to understand the nexus of goal orientation and performance in various organizational context (Li and Tsai, 2020;Sittar and Munawar, 2019;Zhen et al, 2022).However, significant confusion still exists regarding the extent and direction of their interrelationships, particularly with regards to job commitment among lecturers in universities.
Employee job commitment has been directly linked to a firm's performance (Bedarkar & Pandita, 2018).This is because devoted employees often execute their duties beyond expectations making high level of commitment indispensable for enhancing output and obtaining sustainable competitive advantages (Yaghoubi et al, 2021).Yaghoubi and colleagues describe job commitment as the goal of employees for continuous work in the job reflected in their psychological involvement in the job.An employee who is committed to his or her job has less intention to take leave or quit, tend to feel satisfied about the job, and has higher intrinsic motivation (Hanaysha, 2016).Instead, Stackhouse, Zaman & Turner (2022) postulate that committed employees put forth extra efforts to accomplish their work, participate in extra-role behaviour, and assist the company in operating efficiently.Job commitment has been categorized in terms of affective commitment, continuous commitment, and normative commitment (Al-Jabari & Ghazzawi, 2019).
Similarly, factors contributing to these categories of job commitment have largely been categorized in terms of how work environmental factors are perceived by each employee (Zhenjing, Chupradit, Ku, Nassani & Haffar, 2022).Self-determination theory (SDT) of motivation originated by Ryan and Deci in 1985 which suggests that the quality of motivation a person perceives in a specific work environment matters most to an employee (Ryan & Deci, 2017) therefore becomes relevant in understanding job commitment.According to Salikhova, Lynch and Salikhova (2020), SDT distinguishes between external motivation (engaging in an activity to earn a reward or avoid a punishment) and internal motivation (engaging in an activity because it is personally important, valued, or interesting).However, while goal orientation organizational culture has been attributed to diverse outcomes of employees, how the same relates with job commitment among university lecturers still remain underexplored.This would be critical especially in universities which display significant signs of low job commitments as witnessed in countries such as Kenya.
Universities across the globe form major custodians or storehouses of knowledge.According to Chacha, Gakobo and Ochieng (2019), most public universities in Kenya have attracted huge number of students attracted by new programs over the last decade.However, there has been a common trend of missed lecture sessions on the side of university lectures in Kenya on one hand, and poor communication to students in the form of use of imprecise language over the period, on the other hand.In addition, graduates from most of the public universities in the country are less preferred compared to those from Technical, Industrial and Vocational Enterprise Training (TIVET) institutions.This tends to point at inadequate instruction or teaching performance by the lecturers and, to some extent, low commitment to their core duties: pedagogical instruction to students.Whereas previous studies in the Kenyan context (Chacha et al, 2019; Kiplangat, Momanyi and Kangethe, 2017) have highlighted financial incentives and leadership as well as supervision to factors determining different outcomes among university lecturers, goal orientation culture nurtured by these institutions has not been focused upon.This study therefore tested the hypothesis that:

Theoretical and Literature Review 2.1 Theory of the Study
Self-determination theory (SDT) advanced by Ryan and Deci in 1985 was deployed to anchor this study.This is a macro theory of human motivation that utilizes essential concepts on types and quality of motivation and basic psychological needs of an employee (Olafsen and Deci, 2020).The basic tenets of SDT include three psychological needs whose fulfilment ensure adequate worker motivation, being must be fulfilled to adequately motivate workers and ensure that they perform optimally and experience well-being need for competence, autonomous, and relatedness (Gagné et al, 2022).According to Thibault-Landry and Whillans (2019), an employee's psychological need for competence is satisfied when the worker believes that he or she possess the necessary skills to overcome challenges and achieve their desired goals.The need for autonomy, on the other hand, is satisfied when individuals experience a sense of volition in deciding task activities based on their personal values, while need for relatedness is satisfied when individuals feel emotionally and meaningfully connected with others in their surroundings.
This study opted for SDT due to the fact that it postulates that specific social-environmental factors often affect satisfaction and frustration of the basic psychological needs and types of motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2017).Such social-environmental factors concern ways in which colleagues, employees' immediate supervisors, and their higher-level managers create workplace conditions that are important determinants of the employees' motivation, performance, and wellness (Legault, 2017).This study analysed how goal orientation practices as social environmental factors implemented by the universities influence commitment among lecturers.An understanding of how these factors contribute to the satisfaction of lecturers' competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and in consequence, their job commitment.

Literature Review 2.2.1 Goal Orientation Culture
The concept of goal orientation emerged from a research conducted by Carol Dweck among school children (Vandewalle, Nerstad & Dysvik, 2019).Vandewalle and colleagues explain that the children were given some problem-solving tasks which they successfully performed before they were provided by another difficult set of problems which they were unable to solve.The researchers observed two distinct response from the children as they navigated their failure on these difficult tasks.A section of the children exhibited a helpless and maladaptive response pattern, and quickly became demoralized and expressed little interest in continuing with the activity.On the other hand, the other section of the children exhibited a more constructive (adaptive) response pattern, appeared to enjoy the challenge, remained confident that they could eventually solve the problems, and worked at developing more productive problem-solving strategies.Dweck identified two underlying goals from the children in their approach towards solving the tasks: developing ability and demonstrating ability.Dweck proposed the concept of goal orientation, and identified two basic orientations (Sittar and Munawar, 2019).These were learning goal orientation with a preference to develop one's competence by acquiring new skills and mastering new situations; and performance goal orientation with preference to demonstrate and validate one's competence by seeking favorable judgments and avoiding negative judgments from others (Stasielowicz, 2018).Since Dweck's proposal, the concept of goal orientation has been widely studied across diverse contexts.For instance, a study done in the U.S.A to explore within-person fluctuations in dispositional goal orientations over time and the influences of this variability among program trainees by Dierdorff et al (2020) found both stability and significant within-person variability in dispositional goal orientations.Palos, Vîrga˘ and Crasovan (2022) investigated the relationships between personality traits, goals orientation, and teachers' job satisfaction using a sample of 321 Romanian teachers.The results highlighted moderation role of learning goals orientation manifests in the relation between conscientiousness and job satisfaction.Sittar and Munawar (2019), in an analysis of the relationship between achievement goal with teachers' qualifications at work engagement and organizational commitment among universities in Punjab, established that a moderate and positive correlation exist between the variables.Zhang et al (2020) found that team learning goal orientation and individual learning goal orientation influence individual creativity through different information activities in a study done in China.Ali et al (2021) used a sample of managers from private companies in Iran to analyse the role of goal-oriented approach on productivity and found a link between goal orientation and employee productivity.In Indonesia, Soetjipto et al (2021) analysed the influence of performance-prove goal orientation and organizational culture on employee work performance using a population from educational institutions.Analysed data showed that there is no significant effect of performance-prove goal orientation on employee motivation.
Regionally, Ramnarain and Ramaila (2016) used a sample of university students from South Africa to examine achievement goal orientation towards physics and showed that the participants' perceptions of teacher and peer goal emphasis made the largest unique contribution to their orientation.Another study by Akilo and Olaosebikan (2021) examined the effect of strategic orientation on employee performance in private universities in Nigeria and established that that strategic orientation had substantial effect on employee performance.Locally in Kenya, Njenga and Gachunga (2016) analysed the effects of change management strategy on performances in Public Universities, taking the case of the Technical University of Kenya (TUK.Findings revealed that communication strategy and change planning strategy significantly affect performance in public universities.It should be noted from the aforementioned studies that focus on job commitment among university lecturers tends to scanty with regards to influence of goal orientation culture.

Job Commitment
Commitment refers to the psychological immersion of an individual with his/her organization through the feeling of belonging, possession of business goals and preparation to accept obstacles (Stackhouse et al, 2022).According to Bedarkar and Pandita (2018), committed employees are often involved in executing their work with passion and excitement.Job commitment is also looked at as the goal of employees for continuous work in the job and the attachment that exists between people and the job, reflecting the amount and psychological involvement in the job (Yaghoubi et al, 2021).Whereas various studies have been conducted across different contexts on job commitment, how goal orientations influence it seems underexplored.For example, Kohtama¨ki et al (2012) used a sample from medium-sized Finnish IT companies to investigate the role of personnel commitment to strategy implementation on organisational learning.Results showed that participative strategic planning positively affects personnel commitment to strategy implementation.Rustamadjia and Omar (2018) analysed the effect of strategic management on work performance through organizational commitment on employee performance of Muhammadiyah University of Indonesia.Findings showed that strategic management and organizational commitment affect the performance of employees.In Malaysia, Hanaysha (2016) examined how employee empowerment, teamwork, and employee training affect organizational commitment in the higher education context.The findings indicated that employee empowerment has a significant positive effect on organizational commitment.The effect of teamwork on organizational commitment was also found to be positive and statistically significant.Finally, the findings confirmed that employee training has a significant positive effect on organizational commitment.In another study done in Jordan, Al-Madi, Assal, Shrafat and Zeglat (2017) involved a sample from retail stores to explore how motivation impacts on organizational commitment of frontline workers.The authors established that employee motivation significantly impacts on their organizational commitment (affective, normative and continuance).Regionally, Onukwu (2021) investigated lecturers' job commitment and leadership roles in South-South Nigeria universities and revealed existence of low level of job commitment and low level of role performance of leadership.Locally, Gitau and Monari (2019) explored the determinants of employee commitment among constitutional commissions in Kenya and showed that that compensation and reward had a significant effect on employee commitment.

Summary of Literature and Study Gap
The reviewed studies has highlighted the fact that goal orientation including learning goal orientation and performance goal orientation can influence individual employee creativity through performance of different work activities.In turn, productivity of the workforce is enhanced.However, influence of goal orientation in the context of university lecturers seems to have been underexplored.Similarly, although available literature as highlighted in the review in the preceding paragraphs have discussed diverse strategies employed to nurture employee commitment, goal orientation culture has not been focused much especially among university lecturers remains understudied.Based on the existing gap in literature, there was need to pay attention to the relationship between goal orientation and job commitment among university lecturers.

Methodology and Materials 3.1 Study Design
The study was done through descriptive survey design adopting a mixed-methods approach.This approach involves utilization of both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis (Poth and Munce, 2020).This enables triangulation of qualitative and quantitative analysis and results (Dawadi, Shrestha & Giri, 2021).

Target Population
Target population was 56191.This included 1,845 lecturers, being 1,645 from the University of Nairobi and 200 from South Eastern University.It also included 20 deans of schools (10 each from University of Nairobi and South Eastern University), as well as 54,326 students (University of Nairobi=48,326; South Eastern University= 6000).
Krejcie and Morgan's (1970) Table was adopted to obtain a sample size of 377.For sampling procedure, the study used purposive approach to select all the targeted deans.Lecturers and students were selected proportional stratified procedure in line with Nassiuma (2000) recommendation as: Where n= sample size N = population cv = Coefficient of variation (0.2 to 0.3) e = tolerance (0.02 to 0.05) For lecturers, the sample size was 134 while for students, the sample size was 223.Table 1 presents the distribution of sample size.

Instrumentation
The study used a questionnaire containing open-ended and closed ended questions to collect primary data.
Questionnaire was preferred because it enable collection of data from the entire sample size which was relatively large, in a short time, as recommended by Taherdoost (2016).

Validity and Reliability of Instruments
Validity was tested using both content validity index and construct validity.Content validity index (CVI).Yusoff (2019) states that content validity is the degree to which questionnaire questions reflect the content of the phenomena to which the resulting data is to be generalized from.On the other hand, construct validity refers to measures taken to translate the concepts of the phenomena under study to reality.Expert judgment was used to analyse content validity.In this vein, judgments of five experts were rated on a scale of 1 to 4 as: 1 = Relevance; 2 = Clarity; 3 = Simplicity, and 4 = Ambiguity.A calculated rating of 0.96 (96%) was obtained.This was considered as high validity hence viewed as satisfactorily meeting the required level for measuring the expected constructs (Ozair et al, 2017; Lau et al, 2018).Operationalization of key terms was used to guide construct validity/ Reliability of study instrument was measured through test-retest method using data obtained during pilot study involving 16 lectures and 21 students randomly selected from study population and who were eventually excluded from the final data collection exercise.Using data collected from the pilot study, a correlation coefficient of 0.849 was calculated using SPSS software as a measure of reliability.This was considered suitable since this was greater than the threshold of 0.7 articulated by Taherdoost (2016).

Data Analysis and Presentation
Data was analysed using two approaches: quantitative and qualitative approaches.Quantitative data obtained from closed ended questions were coded and entered into SPSS for descriptive and inferential analyses.The analysed quantitative data was presented in tables.
Qualitative data obtained open-ended questions was analysed thematically and presented in narratives as articulated by Braun and Clarke (2006).

Findings and Discussions
The researcher printed and circulated 377 questionnaires to the sampled deans, lecturers and students.The researcher was able to successfully collect 270 satisfactorily filled up questionnaires respondents after several visits to their respective offices.This represented 71.6% questionnaire return rate.

Study Findings 4.1.1 Level of Job Commitment among Lecturers
The respondents were requested to indicate their level of agreement with various statements concerning the lecturers' job commitment based on a Likert scale of 1 to 5. The level of agreement among the deans on statements concerning lecturers' job commitment are presented in Table 2.  2 illustrates that the respondents (deans) were neutral (neither agreed nor disagreed) on whether there was adequate job commitment among the lecturers or not (M=3.093;SD=0.824).The level of agreement among the lecturers regarding lecturers' job commitment was also investigated and results presented in Table 3.I am extremely glad that I chose this organization to work for over others I was considering at the time I joined.

0.834
There's not too much to be gained by sticking with this organization indefinitely.
2.375 1.117 Often, I find it difficult to agree with this organization's policies on important matters relating to its employees.Likewise to the opinion expressed by the deans, the sampled lecturers remained neutral (neither agreed nor disagreed) as to whether there was adequate job commitment amongst them (M=3.267;SD=0.904).The researcher therefore proceeded to analyse how goal oriented culture influence job commitment among the lecturers in the two universities.

Influence of Goal orientation Culture on Job Commitment
The researcher proceeded to assess how goal orientation culture influence job commitment among lecturers.
To this end, deans were presented with statements related to goal orientation culture practices to which they were requested to respond in a scale of 1 -5 from strongly disagree to strongly agree (Table 4).Based on the findings in Table 4, the sampled deans agreed (M=3.985;SD=0.743) that goal orientation culture has influence on job commitment among lecturers.The opinion of the lecturers was also sought as illustrated in Table 5.  5 illustrates that the sampled lecturers agreed (M=3.75;SD=0.77) that the goal orientation practices put forth by the universities influence job commitment.The researchers proceeded to gather the opinions of the students with regards to goal orientation culture and job commitment among lecturers as illustrated in Table 6.7 indicates that the sampled student agreed (M=3.819;SD=0.947) that goal orientation culture prevailing in their universities has influenced job commitment among lecturers

Correlation between Goal Orientation Culture and Lecturers' Job Commitment
Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to establish the relationship between the goal orientation culture and lecturers' job commitment.The findings are illustrated in Table 8.Table 8 illustrates that there is a strong and positive relationship between goal orientation culture and lecturers' job commitment in University of Nairobi and South Eastern Kenya University (r=861; p=0.000).

Hypothesis Testing
The study conducted a simple regression analysis to test hypothesis that: Organizational goal orientation culture does not have significant relationship with job commitment among lecturers at the Nairobi University and South Eastern Kenya University.Table 9 presents the model summary.11 presents the product of regression analysis.The table illustrates that a unit increase of goal orientation culture leads to a unit improvement of 0.618 in job commitment among the lecturers.Based on P-Value of 0.00 as shown on Table 10, this increase was found to be significant since it was less than 0.05 level of significant.Thus; Y=0.951 + 0.618 (X 1 Where: Y= Lecturers' Job Commitment X 1 = Goal orientation culture Consequently, the null hypothesis that: Organizational goal orientation culture does not have significant relationship with job commitment among lecturers at the Nairobi University and South Eastern Kenya University was rejected.The study hence concluded that goal-oriented culture significantly influences lecturers' job commitment in Universities of Nairobi and South Eastern Kenya.Further, qualitative results from open ended questions showed that goals related to timelines for submission of examination results and number of units covered are strictly articulated and adhered to by each department.

Discussions, Conclusions and Recommendations 5.1 Discussions
The study has established that goal orientation culture is a significant predictor of job commitment among lecturers in the university.This tends to imply that the psychological needs whose fulfilment ensure adequate worker motivation are perceived by the lecturers as being fairly fulfilled.This seems to resonate positively with the Self-determination theory espoused by Ryan and Deci (Ryan and Deci, 2017).In line with the theory (SDT), the lecturers' psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness seemed to be satisfied by the workplace environment of the two universities as articulated in Gagné et al (2022).The discussed goal orientation cultures therefore seem to have high potential of arousing satisfaction or dissatisfaction depending on how the lecturers perceive their fulfilments.
Findings revealed that goal oriented organizational culture significantly influence job commitment among lecturers.It has also been revealed that goals related to timelines for submission of examination results and curriculum coverage are adhered to by each department.This tends to illustrate that the lecturers under study seem to predominantly pursue goals associated with effort, planning, persistence, and self-determination which are ostensibly learning goals.This seems to concur with a study done in Romania by Palos et al (2022) which showed that learning goals orientation manifests in the relation between conscientiousness and job satisfaction.Similarly, Dierdorff et al (2020) found both stability and significant within-person variability in dispositional goal orientations in a study done in USA.In addition, Akilo and Olaosebikan (2021) also established that strategic orientation had substantial effect on employee performance in a research done among private universities in Nigeria.However, findings in this study seem to contradict Soetjipto et al (2021) which revealed that there is no significant effect of performance-prove goal orientation on employee motivation in a study done in Indonesia.

Conclusions
Based on the study findings demonstrated in the preceding sections, the study concludes that organizational goal orientation practices investigated in this study explain a significant variation in job commitment among lecturers.It is also concluded that lecturers in the universities predominantly pursue learning goals orientation to plan and execute instructions to their learners for the purposes of achieving desired student outcomes.

Recommendations
The finding that goal orientation culture is a significant predictor of job commitment should prompt managements of public universities to work proactively towards enhancing autonomy, competence, and relatedness among lecturers.

Table 1 :
Sample Size Distribution

Table 2 :
Deans' Agreement with Statements on Lecturers' Job Commitment

Table 3 :
Lecturers' Agreement with Statements on Job Commitment

Table 4 :
Deans' Agreement with Statements on Goal Orientation Culture

Table 5 :
Lecturers' Agreement with Statements on Goal Orientation Culture Mean Std.Dev.I understand the strategic direction of the university that I serve for the next five years.

Table 6 :
Students' Agreement with Statements on Goal Orientation Culture

Table 8 :
Correlation between Goal Orientation Culture and Lecturers' Job Commitment

Table 9 :
Model Summary for Goal Orientation Culture and Job Commitment

Table 9
illustrates that the R-square is 0.861, implying that 86.1% of changes in job commitment among the lecturers in the University of Nairobi and South Eastern Kenya University is attributed to goal orientation culture.The researcher further run an Analysis of variance (ANOVA to test for model fit and significance level of results respectively.The ANOVA test is represented in Table10.

Table 10 :
ANOVA a for Goal Orientation Culture and Job Commitment

Table 11 :
Coefficients a for Goal Orientation Culture and Job Commitment