What do I do? A Categorisation of Informal Leadership Activities Among Female Professors
, and | Apr 03, 2024
About this article
Article Category: Research Article
Published Online: Apr 03, 2024
Page range: 104 - 119
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ijm-2023-0014
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© 2023 Patrick J. Buckland et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Figure 1.
Catalogue of Female Professorial Leadership Identities
| Theme | Description | Female Professor identity | Literary Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mentor/ Advisor | Sometimes referred to as academic citizenship, professorial leadership includes collective responsibilities, closely associated with helping less experienced colleagues develop through mentoring processes. | Stronger sense of duty among female professors to mentor others. | |
| Activities include providing information; mentoring on the rules of the ‘game;’ showing how to strategize research activities; and referrals for opportunities. | Greater engagement with guiding, facilitating, nurturing, encouraging and inspiring activities. | ||
| Important activity to ensure future Professoriate pipeline, however, mentoring is not seen as strategically central to HEIs. | Reinforces an under-appreciation of the value of mentoring as a key female professorial activity. | ||
| Mentors and mentees usually prefer to associate with others with similar characteristics, such as age, race, and gender. | Female under-representation in the Professoriate makes it less likely to secure a female professor mentor. | ||
| Role Model | The Professoriate is expected to be a role model in all facets of the academic role. | Female professors have shown specific capacity to inspire others through teaching and research excellence. | |
| A reliable source of information about the group norms and acceptable behaviour from which other academics can draw. | Women may be considered less prototypical than men regarding the Professoriate and leadership; reinforcing an ‘outsider’ perspective. | ||
| Individuals may see greater potential in their capacity to emulate role models with similar characteristics, such as age, race, and gender. | Under-representation of women in the Professoriate has resulted in fewer female role models for upcoming male and female academics. | ||
| Guardian | Professors are perceived to be intellectual leaders, with internal and external expert influence; they possess a unique publication-based authority and power that is independent of their management and administrative roles. | The challenge of sustainably exhibiting publication-based authority and power due to leaning towards ‘academic housekeeping’ activities | |
| They have a duty to ensure academic standards, values and traditions are being maintained. | |||
| Belief is that they must guard against an increasingly neo-liberal focus, which overemphasises business modes of productivity so that the development of the next generation of academic leaders remains a central activity of the Professoriate. | |||
| Ambassador | Professors are expected to be ambassadors for their institutions and departments, representing their national and international interests. They must also be able to engage and communicate with non-academics and the broader community regarding contemporary issues. | While gender does not appear to play a significant role in being an academic ambassador, female professors acknowledge a perceived gender-ambassador role, separate from that of their academic activities. | |
| Advocate | Professors should engage in advocacy for their discipline or profession and promote conceptual and socio-political standpoints; remedy perceived injustices | Evidence of advocacy for gender equality in the Academy. |
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| Champion for Colleagues | The Professoriate encourages and develops shared academic values and resists threats to the group’s social identity on issues such as managerialism encroachment on academic values, traditions, and freedoms | By virtue of the under-represented nature of women in senior academic roles, female professors are especially valuable as leaders for other female academics. | Arquisola, 2016; Bolden, et al, 2012; |