Always at Odds?: Creating Alignment Between Faculty and Administrative Values

How faculty and administrators at research universities can create a shared sense of values.

In surveys, research university faculty often report that they value teaching more than their departments do. This incongruence holds implications for job satisfaction, stress, time spent on teaching, organizational continuity, and even student evaluations. Using an interactionist view of organizations, Mary C. Wright examines the reasons for this lack of agreement between the individual's values and perceptions of organizational leaders' views. She also examines departments in which there is a consensus about the value of teaching, specifically how formal policies, social networks around teaching, and chair leadership can offer an alternative work environment, or a culture of congruence around instruction. The practices and organizational arrangements of these departments offer lessons for administrators, faculty, and faculty developers who wish to create universities conducive to instructional enhancement. Because this book features extensive case studies of science departments, it also holds implications for those interested in constructing productive work environments and enhancing student learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.

Mary C. Wright is Instructional Consultant at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan.