Date of Degree

12-2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program

Education

Advisor

Osman Özturgut

Advisor

David Fike

Advisor

Michael Forrest

Abstract

In 2013, about 4.8% of Taiwanese people qualified as having a disability; a disability is classified as having mild, moderate or severe, and in some cases, extremely severe intellectual disabilities or having multiple disabilities (Ministry of the Interior, Department of Statistics, 2013; Tseng, 2013). In 2013, there were 254 nursing homes for people with disabilities that were registered with the Social and Family Administration at the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Taiwan (Lee et al., 2013; Tseng, 2013). The current problems in Taiwan’s nursing homes for the disabled include overworked employees, employees with a poor work-life balance and excessive job stress, ineffective leadership, poor communication among administrators, and little or no staff support (Lee, 2007; Lin, 2008; Tseng, 2013). This results in a low sense of job accomplishment, a low sense of belonging, low morale, and lack of cohesiveness (Lee, 2007; Lin, 2008; Tseng, 2013). This negative cycle has led to high turnover rates and minimal retention and has had crippling effects on the organizations (Chou, 2005; Lee, 2007; Lee et al., 2013). According to the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, there is nearly a 50% turnover rate of professional employees at these institutions (Lee et al., 2013; Tseng, 2013). The purpose of this study was to measure the degree to which the superintendents at nursing homes for disabled people in Taiwan demonstrate transformational leadership and how this is associated with employees’ organizational commitment via the mediating effect of extrinsic motivation. Data for analysis, using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), the Work Preference Inventory (WPI), and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ), were collected from full-time employees who were randomly selected from 70 nursing homes for disabled people. An SPSS program was used to analyze the data and descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficients, and sequential multiple regression analysis were used to answer the research questions. This study’s findings showed that gender was not associated with organizational commitment and that superintendents should recruit married employees and employees with college degrees in order to promote more organizational commitment. The findings also indicated that physical care employees’ commitment, compared with the commitment of social workers, special education teachers, and other professionals in nursing homes of Taiwan, was low. Superintendents, therefore, should conduct official self-assessments and unofficial sessions with them to understand which factors lead to their stress and, ultimately, their intention of leaving the organization. The data further showed that deploying transformational leadership practices would be an inevitable trend in order to increase organizational commitment and lower turnover rates aggressively. Lastly, the findings showed that transformational leadership contributed to the variability of organizational commitment significantly and that extrinsic motivation was the important factor of shared variability of organizational commitment. This means that transformational leaders of nursing homes should not only use strategic techniques to develop future innovations and offer high quality services but also take into consideration extrinsic motivation to promote organizational commitment.

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