Success on the Tenure Track: Five Keys to Faculty Job Satisfaction

7. Engaging Leaders across the Campus

* Engaging Leaders across the Campus * Cathy Ann Trower This chapter offers ideas for university leaders (the president and provost, deans, department heads and chairs, and senior faculty) to make progress on improving the workplace for pre-tenure faculty in order to help ensure their satisfaction, success, productivity, and intentions to stay. In order to effectively do so, it is necessary to reflect on both leadership and academic culture because universities are complex entities from both perspectives. I share Schein’s (1992) view that culture and leadership “are two sides of the same coin in that leaders first create cultures when they create groups and organizations. Once cultures exist, they determine the criteria for leadership and thus determine who will or will not be a leader.… The bottom line for leaders is that if they do not become conscious of the cultures in which they are embedded, those cultures will manage them. Cultural understanding is desirable for all of us, but it is essential to leaders if they are to lead” (p. 15). And I agree with Birnbaum’s (1988) point that “the important thing about colleges and universities is not the choices that administrators are presumed to make but the agreement people reach about the nature of reality. People create organizations as they come over time to agree that certain aspects of the environment are more important and that some kinds of interaction are more sensible than others. These agreements coalesce in institutional cultures that exert profound influence on what people see, the interpretations they make, and how they behave” (p. 2). Organizational Culture Culture was defined in the last chapter as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptationPage 157 and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” (Schein 1992, p. 12). Three layers of culture may be analyzed in order to begin to understand an organization: (1) artifacts (visible organizational structures and processes); (2) espoused values (stated strategies, goals, philosophies); and (3) basic underlying assumptions (unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings—the ultimate source of values and actions) (Schein 1992, p. 17). Artifacts In the academy, artifacts would include everything from how buildings are laid out on campus (open spaces, green areas, sidewalks, architecture), to what it’s like inside the buildings (and those might be quite different across a campus), to rituals like commencement and new student orientation, to the structure and reporting relationships of senior administrative posts, to the tenure and promotion processes and the policies that guide tenure and promotion practices. According to Schein, artifacts are easy to observe but difficult to decipher (p. 17); he argued that “it is especially dangerous to infer deeper assumptions from artifacts alone because one’s interpretations will inevitably be projections of one’s own feelings and reactions” (p. 18). Therefore, one must go deeper to examine the values that organizational members say are important. Espoused Values “All group learning reflects someone’s original values, someone’s sense of what ought to be as distinct from what is” (p. 19). Over time, the values that are acted upon and achieve desired results become part of a group’s shared meaning and understanding. Eventually, the most successful strategies become shared assumptions of what is good and correct. The prevailing espoused values “gradually become transformed into nondiscussable assumptions supported by articulated sets of beliefs, norms, and operational rules of behavior” ( p. 20). Schein pointed out an important distinction between what people say they value (espoused values) and values that have actually transformed into basic assumptions. Espoused values “predict well enough what people will say in a variety of situations but which may be out of line with what they will actually do in situations where those values should, in fact, be operating” ( p. 21). Page 158In academe, for example, there are many things we value, including academic freedom, autonomy, knowledge production, peer review, and lifetime job security (tenure). There are also things we say we value, such as diversity, inclusiveness, community service, and interdisciplinary research. But not everything we say we value in academe is rewarded equally or even rewarded at all—something I’ll address later in this chapter. Basic Assumptions If a basic assumption of a group is strongly held, members will find any other premise to be “inconceivable” (p...