Workplace Bullying Among Higher Education Faculty: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature - Part 2

 

...The structural characteristics of higher education institutions make university settings susceptible to abuses of power that produce ongoing, and frequently escalating, perceptions of injustice... Faculty self-governance processes that include the nomination and election of a Chair from within a department create situations in which department leaders possess limited management experience or training and instead have spent their careers in competitive isolation as they confront the challenges of publication, teaching, service, tenure and promotion... As a result, Chairs may not have the skills or motivation to effectively intervene to stop abusive conduct among faculty. In addition, in many universities, Chairs do not have actual organizational power when making decisions and so when conflicts arise, Chairs must rely on their Dean to enforce an administrative action.

This organizational arrangement creates situations in which Chairs can become targets of their own faculty who may refuse to cooperate in good faith, or who undermine them through the Dean’s authority. Alternatively, a Chair who is themselves a bully can use the lack of accountability that accompanies self-governance processes to carry out abusive conduct in relative isolation...

 

In addition to management structures that are easily corrupted, the retention, tenure and promotion process in university workplaces leads to organizational incentives for untenured faculty or those seeking promotion to remain silent in the presence of abusive conduct, either toward themselves or others. Professors working toward tenure or promotion depend on positive recommendations from their department peers, their Chair, their Dean, college-level and university-level committees, as well as the University Provost and President. Each of these recommendations are typically made in unmonitored and confidential meetings and through the use of often subjective, ambiguous or vague performance evaluation policies.

 

Processes to ensure compliance with existing policies, or mechanisms to promote ethical, unbiased and thorough performance evaluations are not a typical aspect of university institutional structures... It is easy to see the many ways such a structure can be manipulated to arrive at, and then justify a negative recommendation. As a result, the processes surrounding these decisions, as well as the decisions themselves become mechanisms through which abusive conduct is perpetrated...

 

...qualitative study of targeted faculty reported that faculty with previously strong performance reviews found their evaluations suddenly negative, seemingly without warning. Participants describe receiving reviews in which objective accomplishments were ignored, while narrow and minor issues (such as student evaluations from one course), were overemphasized in order to justify a negative performance evaluation decision...  targeted faculty described having guidelines for publication changed during the process to exclude their scholarly achievements from review...  that the threat of negative tenure and promotion decisions was a persistent fear among targeted faculty...

 

Lemon, K., & Barnes, K. (2021). Workplace bullying among higher education faculty: A review of the theoretical and empirical literature. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 21(9), 203-216.