During the COVID-19 pandemic, student services leaders needed to adapt to working entirely virtually, find creative solutions to adjust their service delivery, and change how they engaged with their teams. Before COVID-19, studies of virtual leadership focused on virtual teams developed because of the geographical distance between team members.…

The purpose of this study was to describe how frontline student service professionals in Western Canadian higher education describe their personal engagement at work, through the lens of Kahn's (1990) theory of employee engagement and psychological dimensions of meaningfulness, safety, and availability. It was motivated by the prospect that…

Starting a career in academia is often fraught with uncertainty, turbulence, and isolation, as aspiring professors manage multiple, often contract-based roles in order to advance their curriculum vitae and secure a livelihood. In this research study, we use narrative inquiry to illuminate the role our critical friendship has played in our academic…

Decades of established research have focused on the attrition, workplace trauma, and career burnout of student affairs (SA) professionals working at colleges and universities (see N. J. Evans, 1988; Herr & Strange, 1985; Perez & Bettencourt, 2024; Walterbusch, 2019). The purpose of this generic qualitative research study (Khalke, 2016) was…

Higher education has seen a shift that means its leaders are no longer only being recruited and perceived as senior academics who lead teaching and research. Leaders are now sometimes recruited and viewed as managers who oversee the operation of their institution, college, faculty, or school. This paper analyses the initial findings of an…

There is a gap in research exploring stress, burnout, and well-being within the context of educational development. The purpose of this study was to examine the concepts of burnout and workplace well-being among educational developers across the international landscape. Thematic analysis from the survey responses (n = 210) revealed characteristics…

This qualitative case study was designed to explore how student services leaders adapted their leadership behaviors and practices in response to moving to the virtual working environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The case study site was a midsized university in southwestern Ontario. The data collected for the study came from three sources:…

Can authentic leadership engender ethical communities? If so, in what ways? One way that leading authentically may help engender ethical communities is by attending to relationships. Focusing on relational aspects may have value in promoting the ethical potential of authentic leadership. For that ethical potential to be realized, however, leaders…

Academic work has become increasingly fragmented. The horizontal fragmentation of the profession into disciplinary tribes has been accompanied by the increasing participation of student affairs and educational development professionals located outside the academic units but are actively engaged in academic work, such as supporting teaching and…

This case study describes how sociocultural and activity theory were applied in the design of a publicly funded, Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB)-based English as a Second Language (ESL) credential program and curriculum for immigrant and international students in postsecondary institutions in British Columbia, Canada. The ESL Pathways Project…

The nature of the American academic workforce has fundamentally shifted over the past several decades. Whereas full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty were once the norm, more than two-thirds of the professoriate in non-profit postsecondary education is now comprised of non-tenure-track faculty. New hires across all institutional types are now…

Concept mapping was used to illuminate counselors' positive experiences of providing counseling/psychotherapy to students in higher education. Counseling professionals (N = 65) in 23 colleges and universities responded to the question "What are the positive aspects that motivate you to provide counseling/psychotherapy to students?" From…

Studies demonstrate that negative interpersonal interaction(s) (NII) such as bullying are frequent and harmful to individuals in workplace and higher education student settings. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether the degree of perceived severity of NII varies by the status of the actor. The present study explored the moderating effect of actor…

Presents a study on the psychodynamics of work in order to analyze students' relationship to their work organization in an economic context characterized by competition, job insecurity, and anxiety about the future. Collective defense mechanisms were identified, including silence, individualism, isolation, and endurance. (Contains 27 references.)…

A recent study focused on workplace learning in the UK, USA and Canada; 14 universities, two community colleges and 15 host organisations were included. Interviews were conducted with directors of professional peak associations, academic supervisors, placement officers, managers and/or field supervisors and students. This paper reports on the ways…