| This study examines the job characteristics that adjunct faculty members identify as being important and how these characteristics are affected by practices and procedures that are currently in place by school administrators. The overall purpose of this study is to understand the issues that are deemed important by adjunct faculty members attempting to integrate themselves into the culture of an organization.; The ability to attract, integrate, and retain quality employees is one of the most important issues facing organizations; without adequate human capital, organizations are faced with an array of challenges that can inevitably contribute to the demise of an organization.; Community colleges in rural locations face greater staffing challenges than those located in urban areas due to a limited pool of applicants in the residing communities; as a result, the concept of organizational membership and employee retention issues become more critical to institutional operations.; This study focuses on adjunct faculty members employed at Trinidad State Junior College-Valley Campus. The Valley Campus is a small rural community college located in Alamosa, Colorado.; When this study began in 2004, there were 914 students enrolled at the Valley Campus. In addition, at the start of the 2002/2003 academic year, Trinidad State Junior College (Valley Campus) employed 29 adjunct faculty members. At the start of the 2003/2004 academic year, the Valley Campus employed 31 adjunct faculty members; however, only 20 of the original adjuncts from the prior spring semester returned to the classroom. This change in the number of adjunct faculty members represents a 31 percent employee turnover rate within one academic year. In essence, the understanding of variables affecting organizational membership has never been more important to a rural community college.; A search of the literature, cooperative inquiry, interviews, and a survey questionnaire indicated that communication practices, employee involvement, and mentoring/training are the individual pieces that ultimately affect an individual's ability to develop a feeling of membership within an organization.; The use of descriptive statistics and the Wilcoxon Signed-rank Test indicated that adjunct faculty members at Trinidad State Junior College have a neutral to satisfied feeling of organizational membership and are least satisfied with mentoring and training within the organization. As a result, it was recommended that an adjunct faculty assistance program (AFAP) be implemented at Trinidad State Junior College to help newly hired adjunct faculty members transition into the culture of the organization. |
