Organizational Commitment of Academic Staff in Times of War: Motivational Configurations at Frontline University

Abstract

This article examines how academic staff maintain organizational commitment and work motivation at a frontline university that deliberately remained in Kharkiv – a city under continuous shelling – throughout Ukraine's full-scale war. Drawing on 22 semi-structured interviews conducted in autumn 2024 with faculty and administrative staff situated both inside Ukraine and abroad, the study employs an instrumental case-study design centred on V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. The conceptual framework integrates Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, the Job Demands–Resources theory, Self-Determination Theory, Conservation of Resources theory, and Meyer and Allen's three-component model of organizational commitment. Analysis reveals four interacting motivational clusters – mission-symbolic, socio-collective, professional-competence, and instrumental-economic – whose compensatory interplay sustains commitment under chronic threat. Spatial location emerged as an unexpected structural variable, giving rise to two distinct commitment regimes: a frontline regime grounded in shared risk and affective loyalty, and a translocal regime oriented toward normative obligation and institutional representation from a distance. The findings suggest that wartime organizational commitment operates as a moral economy: universities retain academic communities not through resource abundance, but through the ongoing legitimation of diverse forms of loyalty, equitable recognition of contributions, and the maintenance of minimum material predictability.