Affective commitment (academic major) and job satisfaction of internships : mediating roles of supervisor support and career exploration

Abstract

In recent years, higher education institutions have paid increasing attention to facilitating their students’ career exploration through internships. To make an internship successful, site supervisor support is considered indispensable, and previous empirical research has asserted that such support combined with student interns’ career exploration may contribute to their job satisfaction. However, few such studies have investigated the dispositional sources of job satisfaction within the context of internships. To address this gap, the present study hypothesizes interns’ affective commitment to their academic majors (affective major commitment) as the antecedent construct, career exploration and supervisor support as the process constructs, and job satisfaction as the consequence construct within the context of tertiary student internships. The study adopted mixed methods to independently conduct in parallel a quantitative investigation (Study One) and qualitative investigation (Study Two) of tertiary student subjects from the same cohort. The findings were then triangulated to determine an overall interpretation. Study One devised a model with eleven hypotheses to address the first research question that explored the relationships among affective major commitment, supervisor support, career exploration, and job satisfaction of tertiary student interns. A cross-sectional survey was conducted to collect data, and then the model and data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Since the quantitative findings would be limited to the selected constructs, however, a second research question was formulated to determine tertiary students’ perceptions of factors contributing to job satisfaction in an internship and thereby enhance understanding of the research topic. Interviews were arranged to allow a wide spectrum of students to share opinions and experiences concerning their own internships, and the resultant data were recorded and transcribed for thematic analysis. For both Studies One and Two, samples were drawn from the same cohort of tertiary students. The main results demonstrated that the hypothesized model had a moderate fit to the data, and supervisor support, career exploration, or both sequentially, mediated the positive relationship between affective major commitment and job satisfaction. Furthermore, it was found that career exploration overarched career role and generic skills. In Study Two, the analysis resulted in 4 major themes and 15 sub-themes contributing to job satisfaction of student interns. The major themes were: (1) Perceiving work capability, (2) Achieving career-related goals, (3) Having positive work relationships, and (4) Acquiring eye-opening experiences. The qualitative results could be rationally interpreted using the SCCT model of work satisfaction (Lent & Brown, 2006). In the triangulation, most of the quantitative findings of Study One were found to be supported and confirmed by quotes from participants in the qualitative findings of Study Two, with the exception of the first portion of the indirect effect of affective major commitment on job satisfaction through supervisor support. The findings of the present study add new information to the literature pertaining to vocational psychology and internships, and may assist career counselors and school and site supervisors in providing more appropriate advice to the student interns that they serve.