Faculty Empowerment: Its Influence on Teachers' Organizational Citizenship Behavior

This study aimed to determine the influence of faculty empowerment on the Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) of 174 faculty members in the four (4) public and four (4) private teacher education institutions in the province of Nueva Ecija, Philippines. It explored the relationship between the respondents' (a) demographic profile and their empowerment, (b) demographic profile and OCB, and investigated the influence of empowerment to OCB with the use of descriptive-inferential research design, utilizing correlation formulas and regression analysis. The study found that on the domains of empowerment, the faculty members' sense of involvement in decisionmaking was the lowest largely because they did not feel any involvement in making decisions about the institution's budget. Faculty members' monthly income had a positive correlation with their empowerment, while both monthly income and employment status had a significant relationship with their display of organizational citizenship behavior. Regression analysis revealed that faculty empowerment had a highly significant influence on their organizational citizenship behavior. Results of this study have implications for the management of teacher education institutions. Keywords— Decision making, faculty empowerment, organizational citizenship behavior, teacher education institutions.


INTRODUCTION
Teachers are an integral part of any educational institution. They play an important role in the education system and their proficiency, novelty, and development can lead to the success of an organization (Cheasakul and Varma, 2016). It is, therefore, beneficial to an institution if its teachers are empowered.
Teacher empowerment is a popular term used in discussions about education and educational leadership. Research indicates that empowering teachers will significantly influence their organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) which will then yield positive changes within the educational institution. Therefore, it is fortunate for any educational institution if its teachers devote their free time and energy to helping with the growth and prosperity of the institution. Defined by Mesbahi (2017) as a set of voluntary behaviors that are beyond one's formal duties but one engages in to promote the organization, OCB has received a lot of attention from researchers with the view that university instructors play a significant role in the overall success of the university.
The current competitive setting of Higher Educational Institutions in the country requires extra effort from its faculty members to comply with the requirements of the Office of Commission on Higher Education. This means that private and public tertiary teacher's commitment and organizational citizenship behavior, which translates from their empowerment, is an important aspect to consider if the institution is to succeed. This is also true to teacher education institutions.
However, although both the concepts of OCB and faculty empowerment have become popular, there is still limited study conducted on the relationship between empowerment and OCB among teachers in the teacher education institutions in the country, hence this research. It focused on determining the influence of faculty empowerment on the OCB of teacher education institutions. It will be useful in determining the perceived dimensions of teacher empowerment and how teacher empowerment influences their OCB, which will ultimately help teacher education institution leaders in creating strategies to help empower their teachers since teachers play a crucial role in the educational institution's success.

II. METHODOLOGY
This research employed a descriptive-inferential design to determine the influence of empowerment on organizational citizenship behavior among the 174faculty members of public and private higher education institutions in Nueva Ecija. Description method was used to present the respondents' demographics, empowerment level, and organizational citizenship behavior; whereas inferential statistics were used to test the relationship between the respondents' profile and their empowerment and OCB as well as the influence of faculty members' empowerment and organizational citizenship behavior.   Table 1 presents the responses of the respondents on the dimensions of their empowerment. It can be gleaned from the table that the respondents have the highest regard for their status in the institution with the weighted mean of 3.57, which is verbally interpreted as strongly agree. It is not far from the dimensions of professional growth, self-efficacy, autonomy, and impact as the respondents also expressed their strong achievement in them. Still, the respondents had slightly lower belief in their involvement in decision-making with the weighted mean of 3.04 which is verbally interpreted as agree. Overall, the respondents had assessed their empowerment in their organization positively with the grand weighted mean of 3.40 which is verbally interpreted as strongly agree. The data implied that the faculty members of TEIs who served as respondents to this study experienced positive empowerment in their institution. This sense of empowerment among faculty members is beneficial to both the students and the school achievement as supported by various researchers including Ganiban, et However, the respondents' show of lower involvement in decision-making in their college/university implied that there still needs for improvement in the efforts of the institutions to involve their faculty members in making important decisions and to have a stronger sense of empowerment through it.  (2017), will have a positive effect on the performance of the institution. However, their altruistic behavior had the lowest display, which means that they still need to improve their helping behavior as it is an important aspect of a faculty member that will be of help the organization's success.

Relationship between the respondents' demographic profile and their organizational citizenship behavior
The respondents' employment status had a negative correlation, which means that the faculty members who are on contractual or temporary status had a higher display of organizational citizenship behavior compared to their dominant permanently tenured counterparts, thus the hypothesis is rejected. Non-permanent employees may not be expected to display OCB but the result of this study may be due to what Moorman and Harland argued as cited in Lomoya and Pingol, and Calleja (2015). They claimed that regardless of the duration of their contracts, as long as employees perceive that they are being considered as core members and not peripherals of the organization and that they receive fair treatment, will still perform OCB.
Additionally, there was a positive correlation between the respondents' monthly income and their display of organizational citizenship behavior. This means that the higher the monthly income of the faculty members, the more that they display OCB, thus the hypothesis is rejected. This is similar to the findings of Mahnaz, et. al. (2013) where they found that teachers who receive more income exhibit better OCB. In summary, the results show that the respondents' employment status had a negative correlation while their monthly income had a positive correlation with their empowerment, hence the null hypothesis was rejected. On the other hand, other profile variables showed no correlation with faculty empowerment, thus the null hypothesis is accepted.  Table 5 presents the correlation analysis between the respondents' empowerment and their organizational citizenship behavior. As can be gleaned from the table, there is a positive correlation between the respondents' empowerment and their OCB, thus the null hypothesis is rejected. This indicates further that the more empowered the teachers are, the more that they will exhibit OCB, which is similar to the findings of Zohrabi (2017).Finally, since the findings revealed a significant relationship between the respondents' empowerment and their OCB, the null hypothesis was rejected. To test the hypothesis of the study, regression analysis was performed. Table 6 shows the R-square value of .379. This indicates that 37.9 percent of the variance in the OCB is accounted for by the faculty's empowerment. The Beta value indicates that the relative influence of empowerment was highly significant and indicates a positive relationship and great influence on OCB (B=.615, p=.000). This means that the faculty members' empowerment influenced their organizational citizenship behavior, which is similar to the findings of Cheasakul and Varma (2016) and Tindowen (2019) who both concluded that empowerment influences organizational citizenship behavior.

IV. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Faculty empowerment was evident among the faculty members of Teacher Education Institutions. They had positive views about their overall empowerment. They strongly agreed on the dimensions of professional growth, status, self-efficacy, autonomy, and impact, but only agreed on the decision-making dimension. Also, they have exhibited all the dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior at all times with altruism or helping behavior displayed less than the other behaviors. Therefore, teacher education institution's administrators may extend more support, moral and/or financial and material, in faculty research and extension services. Faculty involvement in decision-making, particularly in a budget decision, should be encouraged as this is the area of decision-making that faculty members do not feel involved in. This would make them feel more empowered, leading to the possible development of a sense of responsibility relating to the financial matters of the institution and the resources and projects they are allotted to.
Faculty empowerment showed a significant relationship with organizational citizenship behavior and had an influence on the faculty's display of organizational citizenship behavior. Extra efforts to further enhance the empowerment of their faculty members should be supported by teacher education institutions since it will translate to their display of OCB for the benefit of the students and the college/university. They should treat their (Garcia &Subia, 2019) teachers and personnel with transparency and protection.