A model for explaining relationships between organizational culture, academic adjustment and student identity of the university students

The university organizational culture is one of the most important fundamental factors in empowering the higher education institutions. The concept of adjustment also stands for appropriateness, and adaptation, and one of its types is academic adjustment which governs the students (learners ) ability in adapting with the roles that the university puts in front of them. Moreover, given the different social roles and in accordance with those roles, each individual has a specific identity. Student identity is one of the sub-identities that when an individual reaches the appropriate age for entering the university inevitably gains as a specific identity. Hence, this study was conducted with the aim to evaluate the impact of organizational culture on the students adjustment and the student identity. The method used in this study was non -experimental correlational method (the type of which was scientific modeling or structural equation modeling).The population in this study included all the students of the faculty of psychology and educational sciences, Islamic Azad University, central Tehran branch, 200 of which were selected as the participants of the study, using the stratified random sampling method. The data collection instrument was a questionnaire developed by the researcher of this study, which consisted of three sections: organizational culture, academic adjustment and student identity. The validity of these sections were confirmed through using the confirmatory factor analysis and the Cronbach s alpha coefficient for the three above -mentioned sections were determined as being 0.87 , 0.87, and 0.89, respectively. To analyze the data, in addition to describing each of the variables, in the section related to the implementation of the conceptual model, the two-stage approach was used (first step: confirmatory factor analysis, and the second step: structural equation modeling). The results of the structural model evaluation showed that the university organizational culture has impact on the student identity and academic adjustment of the university students. It was also shown that the impact factor of academic adjustment was more than the impact factor of student identity. The fitting indexes were indicators of the good fitness of the structural model and this issue showed that the evaluated structural model in conceptualization of the potential levels of intervention can have an important role on the students adjustment and also on their identities.

Keywords:

organizational culture , academic adjustment , student identity , student , Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences