University Organizational Culture and Students Academic Alienation: Mediational Role of Mastery Goals

Alienation is isolation from a group or an activity, while in a normal situation an individual is expected to feel solidarity with that group or engage in that activity. Academic alienation causes students to have the least participation in the organizational processes, which leads to their deprivation and isolation from the group of learners in today’s knowledge-based society. The objective of the present paper is to study the relationship between university organizational culture and academic alienation taking into account the meditational role of mastery goals in the form of causal model. The goals of progress theory states that the more environmental factors such as organizational culture support the freedom of action of an individual, the more the individual would form his/her mastery goals and would experience lower degree of alienation. In order to test the theoretical model, the structural equation modeling method was employed to select 357 master’s program students of Tabriz University through cluster sampling method. Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, Academic Alienation and Mastery Goals Questionnaires were used for the collection of data. The results of the theoretical test indicate that the mastery goals have negative impacts on academic alienation. The dimensions of organizational culture (uncertainty avoidance, collectivism and power distance) too have negative impacts on mastery goals. But the impact of masculinity is not significant. Overall, the findings of the present paper indicate that if the university organizational culture supports the students’ freedom (self-determination), they would experience a lower degree of academic alienation.