Re-purposing Universities: The Path to Purpose

As the extent of damage to environmental systems from our business-as-usual activity becomes ever more alarming, Universities as core social institutions are under pressure to help society lead the transition to a sustainable future. Their response to the issues, that they themselves have helped reveal, has, however, been widely criticised for being wholly inadequate. Universities can be observed to engage with sustainability issues in ad-hoc ways, with the scale of attention and commitment dependant mainly on the level of pressure exerted by stakeholders that works to overcome aspects of inherent inertia. Sustainability initiatives can therefore be regarded mainly as bolt-ons. This mirrors how other sectors, including businesses, have tended to respond. As the environmental and social crisis mounts and the window for adaptive change to ensure long-term wellbeing for all narrows, the pressure for deeper systemic change builds. It is in this context that transformation to a “purpose-driven organisation” has emerged as a systemic approach to change, enabling an organisation to align deeply and rapidly with society's long-term best interest and hence a sustainable future. Nowhere has this concept been taken forward more obviously than in the business sector. As business leadership towards purpose becomes more apparent, so the lack of action in this area by universities appears starker. In this paper we clarify what it means to be a purpose-driven organisation, why and how it represents a deep holistic response to unsustainability, and what core questions emerging from the business world university leaders can ask themselves to begin the practical journey to transform their institutions into purpose-driven universities.

Framing Your Future Through Employee Engagement

There are many diverse demands and pressures on institutions of higher education. We are now at a time where innovation is required for many higher education institutions' survival and sustainability. However, university leaders should not look to old archaic change models to determine a way forward. Institutional leaders should look for methods to engage all generations of their workforce and decrease the level of resistance to the proposed change. This chapter looks at employee engagement and provides a model that higher education leaders can deploy to stimulate employee engagement and innovation. Framing Your Future is a model that can easily be deployed at a team, department, or even organizational level.

Reclaiming the Soul of the University in an Agile Corporate World

In today's agile corporate world, the expectation is that the university will be able to rapidly adapt and evolve in response to its ever-changing global, educational, economic, social, political, and technical environments. But, at what cost? This chapter argues that many of our universities have lost their soul in their race to become agile because their focus has shifted away from fully achieving their core purpose—the creation and the dissemination of knowledge—to production-line teaching and learning and income-based research. There is now universal apprehension arising from the belief that university leaders are more concerned with income and budgets than knowledge and people. In response, this chapter argues for a radically new understanding of what constitutes truly effective university leadership which is readily able to create an agile university culture while simultaneously ensuring it sustains its commitment to its core purpose.

Strategic Competencies and Skills for Future University Leaders

The aim of the chapter is to explore competencies and strategic skills required for future university leaders to be more agile in their daily activities. Coping with the pandemic has been particularly difficult for some universities because they serve several different stakeholder, albeit overlapping, functions. The focus will be on the strategic skills that are required for future university leaders and what needs to be done to change universities to be more agile in the future. To contribute to the development of best practices in higher education leadership through approaches and strategies that will be in line with future universities, data will be collected via literature review.

Impact of Workplace Diversity on Employee Performance

The authors explore how the milieu of workplace diversity affects the relationship between employee and performance. In particular, we theorize and empirically examine the moderating effects of four (4) categories of diversity context variables: age, gender, ethnicity, and educational background. The authors perform analyses on 175 out of 320 respondents consisting of academic and administrative staff of four selected private universities in Ghana. The results showed, for example, that workplace diversity has an overall influence on employee performance, however, educational diversity has more effect on employee performance in the universities compared to the other competing variables used in this study. Age and educational diversity had a significant impact on employee performance in the universities whilst gender and ethnicity diversity had no influence on their performance. We discuss future research directions regarding diversity, workgroup context, and performance outcomes and outline some recommendations for administrators and university leaders.

Pacific Universities’ Leadership during the COVID-19 Pandemic- a Case Study of Fiji and New Zealand

The global education system came under scrutiny in 2020 due to the unexpected pandemic. COVID-19 forced higher education institutions everywhere to rethink the way to deliver classes or continue offering their services due to travel restrictions, lockdowns and social distancing policies. This caused major disruptions in carrying out normal teaching and learning. The intervention of university leadership in maintaining decorum during the pandemic entailed making pivotal decisions within a short period of time. The aim of this paper is to highlight various statements made by a group of universities from Fiji and New Zealand to present their position, and policies during the global pandemic. This article discusses how university leaders in the South Pacific with a case study of Fiji and New Zealand have responded to the pandemic. It discusses the statements and media releases of university leaders in Fiji (a developing nation) and New Zealand (a developed nation), particularly their responses and comments on the mode of teaching, international travel, social distancing, financial impact, and research. These focus areas need to be priority for university leaders in making crucial decisions in operating higher education institutions during unexpected events such as the pandemic.

Reputation management at the Russian University: problems and solutions

The monograph presents new research results on key aspects of the university's reputation management. Theoretical approaches to the study of reputation and reputational responsibility, reputation capital and reputational risks of a higher educational institution within the framework of reputation management are highlighted, an assessment of the state and problems of the university's reputation management development is given. Recommendations for improving the effectiveness of reputation management in Russian universities are proposed: the development of a reputation management system, including the university's reputation responsibility system and technologies for its formation, methods of managing reputation capital and reputational risks of the university. It is of interest to university leaders of various levels of management, university teaching staff, as well as for anyone who studies the problem under consideration. In addition, it will be useful for students of higher educational institutions studying in the areas of training "Management" and "Personnel Management".

Universities as Arts and Cultural Anchors

Economic developers commonly refer to universities as anchor institutions because they are large, rooted regional economic drivers that are sites of development, incubation, entrepreneurship, workforce readiness, and knowledge transfer. But most anchor research speaks generally about the university or focuses on STEM and not on arts and culture. Our study asks: what is the role of universities in anchoring arts and cultural innovation in the regional creativity ecology, and how are university leaders identifying, communicating, and investing as arts and cultural anchors? Through a qualitative comparative case analysis of four public universities in the Intermountain West combined with target interviews of field innovators and a synthesis of transdisciplinary literature, we deepen the concept of the university arts and cultural anchor and map a theoretical and practical shift from a traditional to contemporary form of anchoring. We identify four stages of anchor readiness, and we propose a pilot assessment tool for university leaders to determine their anchor stage based on awareness and investment. Our applied research helps universities move from being an arts patron to an arts entrepreneur, investor, innovator, and catalyst.