Student satisfaction has become an important concept in higher education because students are paying higher tuition fees and increasingly seeing themselves as customers and because satisfaction is commonly used as an indicator of quality by quality assurance agencies and the compilers of rankings and league tables. In business organisations, it has been established that employee commitment has a significant impact on employee performance and customer satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of lecturer commitment on student perceptions of teaching quality and student satisfaction. The sample comprised 24 lecturers and 456 students at one Chinese university. Data were obtained through self-administered paper-based questionnaires. A model linking lecturer commitment with students' perceived teaching quality and student satisfaction was created and the hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling. It was found that lecturer commitment to students' academic achievement and lecturer commitment to the social integration of students are both positively related to student satisfaction. However, lecturer commitment to the social integration of students did not appear to influence students' perceptions of teaching quality. The implications for higher education institutions are discussed.