This study's aim was to investigate a hypothesized model examining the associations between students' perceptions of the quality of their relationship with their educational faculty and staff (i.e., relationship quality) and students' involvement. The relationship quality measurement included students' experiences with all educational faculty and staff, with the aim of predicting student engagement and student loyalty. Based on data from 454 higher education students, findings indicate that affective commitment and affective conflict are important relationship quality dimensions that influence the student engagement dimensions of absorption, dedication, and vigor. The main conclusion is that a relationship management approach in higher education is fruitful to achieve positive academic outcomes such as student engagement and student loyalty. 1. Introduction Research on relationships between students and their educational faculty and staff has become increasingly important due to recent developments in higher education. The use of degree completion rates to evaluate universities (Estermann & Claeys-Kulik, 2016; Jones, 2016) or other forms of performance-based funding (Hagedorn, 2015), as well as global competition among institutions and about their rankings (Chirikov, 2016; Elken, Hovdhaugen, & Stensaker, 2016), and increasingly customer-like behavior by students (Woodall, Hiller, & Resnick, 2012), all bring a focus on developing positive relationships with higher educational stakeholders to the fore. Positive student-faculty relationships in higher education can contribute to students' involvement and achievement (Umbach & Wawrzynski, 2005); they have been shown to be related to higher student retention rates (O'Keeffe, 2013), better academic performance (Klem & Connell, 2004), sense of school belonging (Wong, Parent, & Konishi, 2019), and decreased student drop-out rates (Klem & Connell, 2004). Because positive student-faculty relationships can lead to engaged students who enjoy studying and therefore might be connected to their educational faculty and staff during and after graduation, they deserve the attention of higher education institutions (HEIs; Atnip, 2015). Prior educational research on student-faculty or teacher-student relationships has demonstrated that these relationships, when perceived positively, can lead to positive outcomes (e.g.
