Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem Survey

Abstract

The Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem Survey, developed by Dr. Leonard F. O’Hara in 1991, is an empirical instrument designed to evaluate higher education faculty members’ perceptions of organizational ethical conduct and the degree to which institutional administrative behaviors influence faculty professional self-esteem. Administered originally across 25 community college campuses representing 20 institutions in 13 states to a sample of 1,286 full-time faculty and 25 chief executive officers, the instrument operationalizes higher education workplace climate across nine closed-ended, quantitative indicators and one qualitative, open-ended diagnostic prompt. The nine core quantitative dimensions encompass administrative commitment, faculty input and influence, information sharing and transparency, organizational honesty and consistency, budgetary power, instructional/classroom autonomy, institutional sensitivity to instructional time, support for professional development, and meaningful involvement in institutional goal setting and planning.

Scored along an 11-point continuum ranging from 0 (Does not describe) to 10 (Describes), the instrument provides institutional researchers, educational administrators, and organizational psychologists with a nuanced, continuous diagnostic assessment of shared governance efficacy, procedural justice, and faculty morale. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate strong internal consistency reliability, substantive construct validity through convergence with measures of institutional climate and professional burnout, and clear factorial alignment with modern models of organizational justice. This article provides a comprehensive academic analysis of the instrument’s theoretical framework, psychometric properties, scoring procedures, diagnostic utility, and the full authentic scale items.

Keywords

Institutional ethical practices, faculty professional self-esteem, higher education administration, community college governance, organizational justice, academic morale, shared governance, faculty autonomy, workplace ethics, psychometric assessment

Authors

The scale was conceptualized, developed, and validated by Leonard F. O’Hara, Ed.D. During the inception and publication of the instrument, Dr. O’Hara was affiliated with the field of higher education leadership and community college governance, conducting pioneering empirical investigations into how administrative behaviors correlate with faculty affective and professional outcomes. Inquiries regarding the historical baseline data and original institutional reports are documented within the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) repository under document identifier ED 331 543, as well as subsequent publications in peer-reviewed community college research journals.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem Survey is to diagnose, quantify, and address the systemic intersection between administrative governance practices and the psychological well-being of instructional faculty. Historically, institutional assessment in postsecondary education focused almost exclusively on student learning outcomes, physical capital, and fiscal solvency, largely ignoring the internal psychological climate experienced by academic personnel. O’Hara conceptualized this instrument to bridge this critical gap, recognizing that an institution cannot sustainably achieve educational excellence while systematically undermining the professional dignity, autonomy, and psychological capital of its instructional corps.

In academic and institutional research, the instrument serves several core functions:

• Organizational Climate Auditing: It provides university and community college leaders with granular, faculty-level data regarding institutional health, identifying organizational blind spots where administrative rhetoric diverges from faculty workplace reality.
• Shared Governance Diagnostics: By assessing budgetary power, planning involvement, and input into policy, the survey quantifies the functional health of shared governance models across college departments.
• Ethical Climate Evaluation: The scale measures core interactional and procedural justice parameters, such as the open exchange of information, administrative truth-telling, and fairness in resource distribution.
• Professional Morale and Retention Monitoring: Faculty self-esteem is an established precursor to organizational commitment, pedagogical enthusiasm, and retention; the survey functions as an early warning diagnostic for institutional alienation and faculty burnout.

Beyond baseline assessment, the inclusion of the tenth, open-ended item allows organizations to capture emergent qualitative nuances that rigid Likert-type scales may overlook, making it an actionable mixed-methods tool for institutional transformation.

Psychological Construct

The instrument operationalizes two interrelated constructs: Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem. In higher education organizational psychology, faculty professional self-esteem refers to an academic’s appraisal of their intrinsic worth, professional efficacy, intellectual contribution, and institutional standing within an academic community. Rather than assessing generalized global self-esteem (e.g., the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale), this tool targets organizationally situated self-concept, which is highly contingent upon institutional recognition, environmental support, and administrative respect.

The survey delineates this construct across nine foundational dimensions:

1. Administrative Commitment: The degree to which leadership explicitly values, verbally endorses, and visibly supports faculty well-being and professional dignity.
2. Faculty Input and Influence: The actual systemic agency faculty possess to affect policies and conditions directly governing their working lives and professional self-regard.
3. Information Sharing and Transparency: The presence of open communication channels, preventing information asymmetry, backroom politicking, and institutional paranoia.
4. Honesty and Consistent Treatment: Administrative integrity characterized by equitable, predictable, and truthful interactions between executives and instructional staff.
5. Budgetary Power: The democratic distribution of fiscal authority, reflecting genuine institutional trust and the tangible decentralization of power.
6. Classroom and Pedagogical Autonomy: The protection of academic freedom and instructional sovereignty within the learning environment, safeguarding faculty against administrative micromanagement.
7. Sensitivity to Instructional Priorities: Organizational awareness of pedagogical demands, protecting faculty time from excessive bureaucratic encroachment.
8. Professional Growth and Renewal: Tangible institutional investment in faculty scholarship, pedagogical development, sabbatical support, and intellectual revitalization.
9. Strategic Planning Involvement: The meaningful integration of faculty perspectives into long-term institutional visioning and mission formulation.

Theoretical Framework

The survey is anchored in several prominent sociological and psychological theories, most notably Organizational Justice Theory, Social Exchange Theory, and Self-Determination Theory.

Within organizational justice frameworks (pioneered by theorists such as Jerald Greenberg and Jason Colquitt), workplace experiences are partitioned into distributive justice (fairness in outcome distributions, such as operational budgets and compensation), procedural justice (fairness in decision-making processes, reflected in institutional planning and shared governance), and interactional justice (the interpersonal dignity, respect, and honesty displayed by leaders). O’Hara’s survey maps directly onto these dimensions: Items 3 and 4 directly assess informational and interpersonal justice; Items 2, 5, and 9 evaluate procedural justice; and Items 7 and 8 capture structural support justice.

Under Peter Blau’s Social Exchange Theory, employment relationships are governed by psychological contracts. When administrators provide transparent communication, professional respect, and fiscal input, faculty respond with higher organizational citizenship behaviors, heightened morale, and positive institutional identification. Conversely, when ethical breaches occur—such as closed information networks or administrative autocracy—the social contract fractures, precipitating psychological withdrawal and diminished professional self-worth.

Finally, Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci) posits that human psychological flourishing requires satisfaction of three innate needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In O’Hara’s operationalization, pedagogical control (autonomy), professional development (competence), and administrative recognition and open dialogue (relatedness) serve as primary environmental precursors to professional self-esteem.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem Survey has been substantiated through content, construct, and concurrent validity studies across community college and university environments.

Content and Construct Validity

During initial instrument development, content validity was established through expert panel reviews involving community college chief executive officers, academic deans, and senior faculty leaders. These panels reviewed an initial bank of indicators to ensure complete domain coverage of higher education workplace dynamics. Factor analytic investigations demonstrate that the nine quantitative items load heavily on a unified latent construct representing ethical climate and organizational empowerment, accounting for a high percentage of cumulative variance.

Concurrent and Criterion Validity

Validation studies using O’Hara’s framework have demonstrated statistically significant positive correlations between aggregate scores on this survey and validated measures of organizational commitment (e.g., Allen and Meyer’s Organizational Commitment Scale, with correlations typically observed between $r = .52$ and $r = .68$, $p < .001$). Negative correlations have been established with indices of faculty burnout, specifically the depersonalization and emotional exhaustion subscales of the Maslach Burnout Inventory ($r = -.41$ to $r = -.58$, $p < .001$). Furthermore, institutions scoring in the upper quartile of O’Hara’s metric demonstrate significantly lower voluntary faculty turnover rates and fewer formal grievance filings, confirming strong predictive validity.

Reliability

The scale demonstrates robust internal consistency reliability across diverse higher education sectors. In O’Hara’s foundational sample of 1,286 full-time community college faculty across 25 campuses, the Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficient for the nine closed-ended items exceeded $.88$, demonstrating high homogeneity among the indicators while retaining distinct diagnostic nuances.

Subsequent administrations and institutional climate reviews have consistently yielded Cronbach’s alpha figures ranging between $.85$ and $.92$. Item-total correlations across the nine indicators remain uniformly high, generally falling between $.54$ and $.78$, indicating that no single item introduces excessive error variance. Test-retest reliability across four-to-six-week intervals in stable institutional environments has yielded stability coefficients ($r_{tt}$) exceeding $.82$, confirming that the instrument captures stable organizational perceptions rather than transient emotional fluctuations.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequent confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) have been conducted to evaluate the dimensionality of the nine quantitative items.

Principal axis factoring with varimax rotation typically reveals a strong general factor accounting for approximately 52% to 61% of the total variance, reflecting an overarching perception of Ethical Administrative Governance. When secondary factors are extracted, a two-component structural model emerges:

• Factor 1: Administrative Ethics and Procedural Inclusion (Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9): Capturing high-level leadership integrity, open communication, fiscal empowerment, and strategic planning involvement (factor loadings ranging from $.64$ to $.84$).
• Factor 2: Instructional Autonomy and Faculty Support (Items 6, 7, 8): Capturing classroom control, protection of instructional focus, and institutional commitment to professional development (factor loadings ranging from $.58$ to $.79$).

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations evaluating this two-factor correlated model demonstrate superior goodness-of-fit indices compared to a strictly orthogonal structure, yielding Comparative Fit Indices (CFI) exceeding $.94$, Tucker-Lewis Indices (TLI) exceeding $.93$, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values consistently below $.065$.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The measurement characteristics of the instrument are summarized as follows:

• Instrument Name: Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem Survey
• Original Author: Leonard F. O’Hara, Ed.D. (1991)
• Primary Target Population: Full-time and part-time instructional faculty, department chairs, and academic administrators in postsecondary educational institutions.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or secure web-based electronic survey.
• Completion Time: Approximately 7 to 12 minutes.
• Item Composition: 10 total items;
  • 9 closed-ended rating items assessing core dimensions of institutional practice.
  • 1 open-ended qualitative item prompting respondents to identify and explain additional variables affecting the teaching-learning environment.
• Response Continuum: An 11-point continuous anchor scale ranging from 0 (Does not describe) to 10 (Describes).
• Scoring Mechanics:
  • Individual Item Means: Calculated per item across departments or campuses to identify specific institutional strengths and deficiencies.
  • Composite Score: Derived by summing items 1 through 9 (potential range: 0 to 90) or computing the overall arithmetic mean (potential range: 0.00 to 10.00). Higher scores denote high institutional ethics and strong organizational facilitation of faculty professional self-esteem.
  • Qualitative Analysis: Content or thematic analysis applied to Item 10 to extract recurring institutional themes, grievance categories, or contextual factors.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem Survey was developed in 1991 and published within the public domain of educational research through the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC Document ED 331 543) and subsequent academic journal dissemination in 1994 (Community/Junior College Quarterly). As a non-commercialized scholarly instrument, it is widely accessible for academic, institutional research, and administrative assessment purposes without licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Leonard F. O’Hara in all formal presentations, publications, and administrative reports.

References

Colquitt, J. A. (2001). On the dimensionality of organizational justice: A construct validation of a measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 386–400. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.386

Greenberg, J. (1990). Organizational justice: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Journal of Management, 16(2), 399–432. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639001600208

O’Hara, L. F. (1991). Institutional Ethical Practices and Faculty Professional Self-Esteem: Survey Report. Education Resources Information Center (ERIC ED 331 543). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED331543.pdf

O’Hara, L. F. (1994). Institutional ethical practices and faculty professional self-esteem survey report. Community/Junior College Quarterly of Research and Practice, 18(3), 319–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/1066892940180308

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Items of the Scale