Committing to vocational educational development: Making the pledge

The development of management and workforce skills are increasingly valued as the key to economic success (CEC 2000; Leitch 2006; CMI 2009; UKCES 2009), however despite a succession of government white papers, numerous initiatives to incentivise employers and individuals, and substantial government funding, the goal of a highly skilled UK workforce remains stubbornly elusive. Central to the success of the government‟s goal for a highly skilled UK workforce, is the commitment of employees to their own development but whilst employers are given financial encouragement to make a „Pledge‟ to development, the challenge of gaining the commitment of employees, though fundamental, receives little attention in the Government‟s Plan (DIUS 2007, 53). Commitment is now acknowledged to be a multi-dimensional and complex construct which may be directed to multiple targets or foci but it may also have different „bases‟ which Becker refers to as „the motives engendering attachment‟ (Becker 1992, 232). Meyer and Allen‟s (1991) three component framework of commitment, incorporating affective, continuance, and normative bases, has become the ‟dominant‟ model in the management literature (Solinger, Van Olffen and Roe 2006, 70). Having tested the relevance of these bases with both organisational and occupational commitment, Meyer et al suggest that they appear to be „generalizable across domains‟ and recommend „research directed at further extensions of the model‟ (1993, 20). In this paper, the concept of development commitment, a new and relatively unexplored focus, is explored from an interpretivist perspective in a higher vocational educational context. The objective is to develop a conceptual model of commitment in this context and to assess whether the emerging concept is compatible with existing models depicting multiple components of commitment. Following an initial pilot study involving interviews and focus groups, twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted during the spring and summer of 2009. Using an „extreme case sampling‟ approach (Saunders, Thornhill and Lewis 2009, 239) the population selected for interview were the part-time students who were enrolled on several cohorts of an award winning Foundation Degree in Leadership and Management during the 2007-8 and 2008-9 academic years. The concept of development commitment which emerges encapsulates two dimensions, a binding dimension and a sacrificial dimension restricting freedom of action, a perspective consistent with Angle and Perry‟s (1981) first division of commitment into two subscales (continuance and effort). Indeed this study further supports their conclusion that these two dimensions vary independently. Accepting the dominant view that commitment is an attitude (Buchanan 1974; Angle and Perry 1981; Mowday, Steers and Porter 1982; O‟Reilly and Chatman 1986; Allen and Meyer 1990; Solinger, Thornhill and Lewis 2006) one of the key findings is that development commitment having a behavioural focus, is distinctly different from commitment to an entity in that there can be no passive form. The findings have been evaluated against existing models and inform the formulation of an original conceptual model which incorporates constructs from applied psychology and offers new avenues of enquiry for future research. Whilst development commitment is conceived as multi-dimensional, the study reveals four components: affective, calculative, normative and a fourth self-evaluative component. Critically, this study found that in the context of higher vocational educational development, certain combinations of contextual conditions may inhibit the employees‟ decision to make a commitment irrespective of their desire to progress and despite having a keen awareness of the „links between getting economically valuable skills and getting good jobs‟ (DIUS 2007, 10). Government assumptions that such knowledge will engender development commitment are therefore questionable.