Chapter 2: Analyzing Determinants of Teacher Commitment and Retention: Role of Teachers’ Professional Identity and Organizational Identification

Empirical evidence has shown that teacher attrition rate is increased significantly by low levels of teachers’ organizational identification and professional identity (Riketta, 2005). Organizational identification is defined as “the perception of oneness with or belongingness to an organization, where the individual defines him or herself in terms of the organization(s) in which he or she is a member” (Ashforth & Mael, 1996, p. 25). Professional identity is defined as “an ongoing process of interpretation and reinter-pretation . . . that result from the how teachers made sense of themselves as teachers as they develop professionally” (Chong, Low, & Goh, 2011, p. 52).