“It’s Not About Me!”: A Phenomenological Examination of Work Calling in Higher Educational Leaders

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 3:35 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Phenomenology in Organizational Studies in Higher Education (Table 5)

Abstract

This phenomenological study drew on Duffy and Dik (2009) and Wrzesniewski (1997) research on work calling to examine the role of work calling on faculty who felt “called” to move away from the classroom and into executive level leadership roles. Snowball and criterion sampling methods were employed to identify the tenured faculty. Participants took part in open-ended interviews with the goal of understanding work calling’s stages from awareness to manifestation and its impact on the organizations these individuals lead. This work also reviewed how demographics, specifically gender and ethnicity, interact with work calling in order to investigate the ways in which tenured faculty who choose to become higher education leaders.

Author

• Aaron Gibbs, Rutgers University - Newark