The purpose of this study is to investigate how several personality traits and two affective states might be associated with organizational (affective) commitment in a Middle Eastern collectivist culture like Turkey. We tested moderated mediation models of the effects of Big-Five personality traits on affective commitment to the organization while investigating the mediation effects of two affective states (i.e., positive affectivity and negative affectivity) and the moderating effects of a personality trait (i.e., core self-evaluations) on these relationships. Data were collected in a field study (N = 312) using a time-lagged research design. As expected, the results indicated that the traits extraversion and agreeableness are positively related to affective commitment through positive affectivity when core self-evaluations is high-to-medium in strength. The results also showed that the indirect and negative effect of neuroticism on affective commitment via negative affectivity was not supported. The main contribution of this study is the focus on personality and affectivecommitment linkages, giving an increased understanding of the processes, mechanisms, and conditions (i.e., indirect and moderating) operating within these linkages.
Increasing students’ motivation in higher education by designing a specific curriculum has always been a challenging but very complex process. The Department of Business, Finance and Marketing (BFM) of The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) initiated a redesign of the curricula with the major goals of increasing flexibility of learning opportunities and offering students a more motivating, inspiring and richer diversity of learning experiences. In the literature of learning in higher education this has often been labeled as ‘offering extracurricular learning opportunities’. The redesign of the curriculum implies that the new one will result in an enhancement of the flexibility of the curriculum, by offering learning opportunities beyond the borders of specific programs like marketing, finance or entrepreneurship and retail management. The richness and diversity should create flexible platforms, offering students the possibility to enrich their career choices to design their own personalised career path, hopefully maximizing the possibilities for their talent development. However, very little is known about the relationship between the students’ satisfaction with extracurricular learning opportunities, aiming at the personalisation of students’ career choices, and their motivation. In this chapter we describe our research into this relationship between student motivation and learning environments. Designing a network curriculum by increasing the possibility of extracurricular learning opportunities in higher education could have a positive impact on students’ motivation when it is combined with activities to increase goal students’ commitment. This depends on teachers’ qualities to communicate the valence and instrumentality of the learning possibilities offered for the prospective work environment. This is a complex issue however. Teachers from different educational programs, even in the same domain, have a different orientation on existing learning opportunities within one specific program. Excellent coaching skills by tutors are important. These coaching skills are necessary to support students in the process of envisioning extracurricular learning opportunities when important career choices have to be made.
