2019 Annual Conference

Colleges and Universities

Shared Concurrent Session (Approx. 12 or 20 minutes)

Academic departments have unique cultures, often stressing individuality rather than collective. The results often lead to challenging academic departmental cultures, high turnover, burnout, and non-productive work environments. This session focuses on the results of a national survey of 150 department chairs about how to improve deparmtental work cultures.

This session is ideally positioned for those working in faculty development or academic administration, but will also be of interest to those who are broadly working in or researching workplace cultures. A secondary target audience would be those interested in leadership and the role of leaders in improving workplace performance.

Upon completion of the session, participants will:
1. Be aware of the challenging behavior that can arise in creative or academic environments, and the reasons that individuals might gravitate to this type of behavior;
2. Become knowledgeable of common response strategies for dealing with difficult people in a department or unit;
3. Understand and become aware of strategies that department chairs are using to improve their workplace culture; and
4. Identify what department chairs think is the best way to take into consideration changes in the workplace environment in building more effective departmental cultures.

Colleges and universities are dependent upon their faculty members to produce a student experience that is transformational. This reliance has been the impetus to call faculty members the “life blood” (Kang, 1999) of an institution, and there has been little debating the central role of the faculty member in the education of college students. For over 100 years, faculty in American colleges and universities have been organized around their academic discipline in thematically identified ‘departments’ (Vacik, 1997). Although there has emerged a generation of super-departments that are less disciplinary in nature, the fundamental organization is that faculty with similar expertise are housed in a collective unit, and this unit is overseen by a ‘chair,’ ‘head,’ or ‘director.’ The purpose for conducting the study was to identify best practices and problems associated with managing faculty expectations and behaviors in higher education institution’s academic departments. To collect data, a research-team survey instrument was developed and administered to 150 department chairs at four-year universities. Categories of questions included curent behaviors, response strategies, changes to the workplace environment, and the organizational climate assessment inventory.

This presentation is best suited for a shared concurrent session. In such an environment, the session would begin with a briefing on incidents of incivility in the academic department followed by a presentation of related literature. The study research methods will then be introduced, and the majority of the session will focus on the results of the national survey.