Collegiality in Business Schools: Development of a Collegiality Measure and Evaluations of Its Implications

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Publication Title

International Journal of Educational Management

DOI

10.1108/IJEM-02-2014-0022

Abstract

Purpose
– While collegiality is often discussed and touted as a critical aspect of academia, there is little research that empirically examines collegiality in university business schools. One cause of the paucity of research is the lack of a reliable scale to measure collegiality (Sabharwal, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to develop a scale that measures collegiality at the departmental level for university faculty, and then uses it to understand the implications of collegiality within an academic department within a business school.

Design/methodology/approach

– The present study uses a scale development process consisting of: defining the domain of the construct; item generation; and psychometric assessment of the scale’s reliability and validity. Items were adapted for a university business school context from Shah (2011) and Seigel and Miner-Rubino (2009). The scale was administrated using a convenience non-random sample design drawn from active marketing and entrepreneurship academics who subscribe to the American Marketing Association’s ELMAR and the Academy of Management’s ENTRE list-serves.

Findings

– The faculty collegiality scale (FCS) was found to exhibit sound psychometric properties in this study. The study found that assessments of department-level collegiality are associated with budgets, performance evaluation processes, and workload allocations. In addition, factors from the FCS mediate the relationships between institutional variables and work satisfaction, which indicate that collegiality is an important determinant of work satisfaction in a contemporary university environment.

Originality/value

– The FCS developed in the present study offers business school academics and administrators a glimpse into the dimensions of what the marketing and entrepreneurship academics perceive makes a good colleague – one that provides professional and social support and is trustworthy; does not engage in politics, positioning, or rent-seeking to advantage their own situation; and that contributes to the well-being of the students, the department, the discipline and the university. In addition, the present study found that the FCS was related to budgets, performance evaluation processes, and faculty workloads.

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS