It’s Ok Not to Be Ok: Work Engagement and Affective Commitment of Business and IT Faculty Members in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Proceedings of The 4th World Conference on Teaching and Education

Year: 2022

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/4th.worldcte.2022.06.10

[PDF]

It’s Ok Not to Be Ok: Work Engagement and Affective Commitment of Business and IT Faculty Members in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Veronica R. Gamboa

ABSTRACT: 

In March 2020, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic health crisis shook the education industry and forced abrupt changes both in the work environment and in learning modalities. Despite professional development and the availability of institutional support for online teaching and learning, a higher education institution in Manila, Philippines found that there was a higher rate of student-reported complaints regarding faculty performance (i.e. teacher absenteeism, insufficient teaching and learning materials for online learning, and the lack of feedback on learning inquiries) in full online learning modalities than in pre-pandemic face-to-face mode. To better understand the effects of these changes to the work engagement (i.e. vigor, dedication, and absorption) and affective commitment of higher education faculty in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, 65 faculty members teaching business and information technology were surveyed online using the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale 9 (UWES-9) and the Affective Commitment Scale. It was found that (1) work engagement leads to affective commitment, (2) that age and the years of service moderate work engagement, and that (3) gender makes no difference in either the work engagement and affective commitment of faculty members. Future longitudinal studies are recommended to explore other related variables such as job demand-resources and burnout in the academia.

keywords: absorption, dedication, online modality, vigor, well-being.