Employee Resignation(s): Managing Mobbing Through Periods of Intensified Stress

• In Event: Reconsidering Fairness Technologies: A Call for Critical Leadership Study of Mobbing and Managerialism

Abstract

In their 2021 chapter, Author 1 & 2 explored the utility of mobbing within new managerialism. If, as they posit, neoliberal reforms induced and leveraged precarity to enhance organizational responsiveness, the perverse incentives to do so remain and were likely magnified by the pandemic. By increasing costs, accelerating attrition, and intensifying staff and student stress, the pandemic magnified ongoing organizational angst in pk-12 and higher education organizations.

Drawing on Vivek Chibber’s (2022) theorization of resignation, Author 1 considers mobbing dynamics in schools and colleges working through reform and pandemic stressors. Given the differing contexts, this paper considers implications for leadership responses to mobbing in pk-12 and higher education settings. In the former, the author assesses the exacerbation of staffing challenges given growing teacher stress, demoralization, and attrition (Associated Press, 2021; de la Cour, 2021). In the latter, the focus is on tensions among key staff groups—tenured, non-tenured, and part-time faculty and support staff—as colleges and universities cut costs, compete for students, and transition to web-based delivery. Across both settings, the author considers organizational conflict derived from contracting out instructional design and delivery to skilled gig-workers—referred to as “the precariate” (Standing, 2011, 2014). Author 1 directs particular attention to the intersection of those responses with the prospects for deteriorating mental health, microaggressions, and mobbing discussed above.

Author

• Brendan D. Maxcy, Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis
  Presenting Author