Organizational commitment is a major determinant of organizational effectiveness and desirable employee attitudes and behaviours. Highly committed academic staff are the backbone of universities since they play an important role in the success of their institutions. This study investigated factors associated with organizational commitment among academic employees of a university in Botswana using a representative sample of 165 respondents. The study also sought to develop a parsimonious model that can predict organizational commitment among academic employees in Botswana. The results show that about 3 out of 5 academic employees sampled showed evidence of commitment to the university, regardless of their socio-demographic or socio-economic background. The study found 11 factors that were associated with commitment to the university. Most of the factors that affected organizational commitment involved decisions and actions that were directly or indirectly at the disposal and control of the management. The single most important factor that predicted commitment to the university was acceptance of the new criteria for the assessment of academic staff, followed by perception of opportunities for research.

Affective commitment remains an essential factor in key outcomes such as work performance and productivity, and has been shown to have the strongest positive relation with positive work behaviours when compared with normative commitment and continuance commitment. Using a sample of 164 academic employees at the University of Botswana, this study assessed the extent to which they had affective commitment to the organization. We also investigated factors that are associated with affective commitment and those that predict affective commitment of academic employees. The study found that only 34.1% of academic employees sampled had affective commitment. Logistic regression analyses identified three predictors of affective commitment among academic employees. They are satisfaction with management, contribution to policy making, and responding to emails. While some researchers have found that associations between affective commitment and demographic variables were generally low or weak, this study found no significant associations between demographic factors and affective commitment.