"Since a chair's personal power is also based on faculty perceptions of how highly the dean regards the chair, chairs can also increase their personal power by increasing their credibility with the dean."

Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#366 THE POWER TO MOTIVATE FACULTY

Folks:

The excerpt below looks at the notion of "personal power" in the role
of department chairs. It is taken from the section: The Power to
Motivate Faculty, in Chapter one, Strengthening Leadership at the
Departmental Level, from: STRENGTHENING DEPARTMENTAL LEADERSHIP: A
Team-Building Guide for Chairs in Colleges and Universities.
Copyright © 1994 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street,
San Francisco, California 94104, Web address:
<http://www.josseybass.com> Peprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Demystifying Grant Seeking

Tomorrow's Academia

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THE POWER TO MOTIVATE FACULTY

Chairs have three kinds of power through which they can motivate
faculty: position power, personal power, and expert power. [The
following excerpt looks at personal power and its specific
significance for the department chairs.]

Personal Power

Although position power varies from institution to institution,
within an institution, it is by and large a given. It is personal
power that varies considerably from chair to chair and that can be
increased. Personal power comes from several different sources. Some
individuals possess influential personal characteristics such as
charisma, the ability to attract others to identify with them and
follow them. The respect a chair has won from the college or the
university at large, faculty perceptions of how much influence a
chair has with the dean, a chair's fairness and reasonableness in
dealing with faculty, the respect a chair is given within his or her
own discipline, a chair's consulting experience, all of these factors
contribute to the amount of personal power a chair possesses.

However, coercion is also part of personal power. Coercive
individuals exert power because they are able to instill fear. This
is not the same as having the power to exercise legitimate
punishment, such as recommending no release time for research because
a faculty member has produced nothing for two years. Such legitimate
refusals are part of position power. Coercive power is not legitimate
and may include threats such as, "If you don't agree to serve on that
committee, I will give you an early morning and late night schedule";
or, "I will see that you do not get release time for research," even
when objective criteria and the faculty member's prior productivity
suggest that release time is warranted. Some chairs manage to get
away with such tactics for years before faculty take things into
their own hands and request that the dean poll department members to
discover whether they have confidence in the chair.

Chair can increase their personal power in a number of legitimate
ways. If chairs are equitable in their distribution of department
resources, treat everyone with respect, are perceived as working for
and fighting for the well-being of their faculty members when the
cause is just, create a supportive climate in the department, and
give people recognition and visibility for achievements, their
personal power becomes greater.

In particular, the typical structure of colleges and universities
also provides an opportunity for chairs to increase their personal
power. As long as colleges and universities function as
bureaucracies, characterized by short career ladders and limited
reward systems, faculty find that excellence rarely pays off. Most
individuals with doctorates begin their academic careers as assistant
professors, and most do not become administrators; therefore, they
can receive only two promotions during a career lifetime. Since the
1960s, when rotation of the chair's job became commonplace, most
individuals have not retained that job for more than one or two
terms. (Chairs at large state universities often provide an exception
to this statement.) Moreover, once faculty members become tenured
full professors, recognition within their own university is a
relatively rare occurrence. Merit increases for faculty are given in
some institutions, but when the criteria are not clear and objective,
or when there are more losers than winners, merit salary awards have
a negative impact on morale. A faculty member who does not receive a
merit increase is likely to think, what I am being told is that all
of the work I have done for this institution during the past year is
worth nothing.

Under such circumstances, when there is a vacuum of reinforcement for
good work, department chairs serve a unique function when they
demonstrate respect for and acknowledgment of the work in which
faculty members are engaged. Colleagues need recognition, and chairs
are in a good position to supply it. When they do so, in addition to
providing greatly needed positive feedback to faculty, they increase
their personal power. When an organization provides little
reinforcement, people in that organization want to please those
individuals who do provide recognition. Increasing personal power in
this way is not manipulative. The responsibility of a chair as leader
of a department is to achieve departmental goals. When that chair can
influence faculty to match their own goals with departmental goals,
so that both sets of goals are achieved at the same time, he or she
unleashes an enormous motivational force.

Rewarding faculty does not require financial remuneration. Recently,
working with about fifteen deans in a large state university, I asked
what they could do to reward their chairs. The immediate, almost
unanimous response was, "We can't reward them because all increases
in salary are given as a percentage of their professorial rank." But
when I asked the deans how their vice president could reward them,
instantly, from various places in the room, came suggestions:
"Recognition for increasing enrollment in these tough economic
times"; "A simple thank-you for having accomplished an outstanding
review in my college"; "Some appreciation for an adroit handling of a
near-revolt when students read misinformation in the student
newspaper that a department had been threatened with closure by an
accrediting organization because equipment was obsolescent." Then,
the light went on: "What you're saying is that we can acknowledge
what chairs have accomplished; let them know we appreciate them."
And, yes, that was the message.

People need honest recognition of their work. I am not recommending
insincerity but genuine acknowledgment of what it is that faculty are
doing. Chairs need to talk with faculty about their teaching, their
research, their outreach efforts, their committee work, recognizing
whatever they have done that is of value. Chairs who value effective
teaching need to pass along the good things they hear about faculty
members' teaching. If a syllabus has a particularly good reading list
or includes an innovative idea about how a course will be structured
to increase learning, the chair should compliment the instructor. So
often, individual contributions, sometimes heroic in terms of time
commitment, are taken for granted. The message a faculty member gets
is, Nobody thinks what I have done is important.

Since a chair's personal power is also based on faculty perceptions
of how highly the dean regards the chair, chairs can also increase
their personal power by increasing their credibility with the dean.
Chairs can demonstrate that they are acknowledgeable and reasonable
people by their behavior at chair meetings and their judicious
responses to topics raised by the dean. Keeping informed about
essential issues related to the functioning of the department, making
positive rather than negative statements, resisting any tendency to
complain about faculty, and responding to questions thoughtfully with
answers based on evidence rather than hearsay or guesses raises a
chair's credibility. Chairs should also prepare carefully for
meetings with their deans, obtaining an agenda in advance so that
they come prepared to discuss the appropriate issues and avoid what
happened to the chair whose department lost six elective credits
because he had not informed himself about the agenda in advance of a
meeting with a new dean. At the meeting, the dean asked him to give
up six credits that had previously been co-listed with another
department. Because the other department was small and had too few
majors, the dean asked the chair to give those courses to the other
department. Faced with no opportunity to think about it but not
wanting the new dean to think he was uncooperative, the chair agreed.
Only afterwards did he realize that his department would have to
terminate the two adjuncts who had been teaching those specialized
courses for years. This was one of several events that caused faculty
to lose faith in him and his ability to represent them.

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