The impact of perceived fairness, organizational and professor support on students' intentions to quit

Abstract

PurposeThe extant research on student attrition and retention has relied on models that focus on factors over which universities may have limited control and thus not lead to actionable practices. To address this shortcoming, the authors applied organizational support theory (OST) to test the association between students' perceptions of justice, perceived organizational support (POS), perceived professor support, organizational identification, and intention to quit.Design/methodology/approachUsing items from validated scales, a survey was used to collect data from students in the college of business at a southwestern public university in the United States. A final sample of 316 observations was fitted to a structural equation model to test the study's a priori hypotheses.FindingsThe authors found that professor support and procedural justice had direct positive effects on POS. Distributive justice and interactional justice indirectly influenced POS through professor support. In turn, POS had decreased students' intention to quit and increased their organizational identification. The antecedents of POS indirectly influenced intention to quit and organizational identification. The determinants in the model accounted for 12% of the variance in students' intentions to quit, and 25% of students' organizational identification.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the student attrition literature where few studies have applied OST to student populations despite the strong link between POS and intention to quit in employment settings. In this study, the authors provide evidence of the suitability of the OST framework to predict students' intentions to quit.