Christensen, M., Dawson, J. orcid.org/0000-0002-9365-8586 and Nielsen, K. orcid.org/0000-0001-9685-9570 (2021) The role of adequate resources, community and supportive leadership in creating engaged academics. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18 (5). 2776.
Abstract
The vast majority of research in academia focuses on the adverse working conditions and poor wellbeing. The present paper presents a positive view on the factors that may promote work engagement in academia. Based on conservation of resources theory, we suggest that academic resources may be related to a social community at work, which in turn creates work engagement among academics. Having positive leadership in the form of fair leadership may be an important contextual factor ensuring that resources are shared fairly and openly. In a study of 1499 academics in Norwegian universities, we found that sufficient administrative resources to support teaching duties were positively related with work engagement, and that a sense of community mediated the relationship between academic resources for teaching and work engagement. These results propose that building academics’ social resources by providing them with the necessary resources to perform their jobs will buffer the impact of a leadership that is perceived to be unfair and help them to perform their work in a positive way. Our results carry important implications for how positive psychology may be used to support engaged workers in academia.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 The Authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | work engagement; community; academic resources; leadership; academia |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health (Sheffield) > School of Health and Related Research (Sheffield) > ScHARR - Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 15 Mar 2021 10:13 |
Last Modified: | 15 Mar 2021 11:23 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI AG |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/ijerph18052776 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:171739 |