Destructive Leadership and Organizational Culture as the Predecessors of Academic Mobbing

Abstract

Global trends like university rankings and neoliberal policies have changed the operation of the higher education systems worldwide and brought a new managerial understanding that prioritized competition and quantification of performance over collegiality and quality. This transformation rendered values like trust and professionalism hollow, weakened the relationships among faculty and directors, and prepared a suitable ground for mobbing to flourish. The study aims to examine the phenomenon of academic mobbing from the perspectives of Turkish faculty based on Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Model and Leader-Member-Exchange Theory. 12 semi-structured in-depth interviews with targeted faculty working at different universities in Ankara, İstanbul, Konya and Eskişehir were conducted. The major findings of the study were: the perpetrators of mobbing were the directors who adopted autocratic and laissez-faire leadership styles and had good relationships with in-group members; academic culture was described with threat, fear, jealousy, humiliation, high-power-distance and collectivisms, all of which triggered mobbing; the targeted faculty were determined, strong, and self-confident in nature as well as impulsive and aggressive at times; mobbing predominantly ended in resignation, psychological and psychosomatic problems, and the lack of belonging; the top two coping strategies were getting social support and facing the mobbers; and the most frequent suggestions were for leaders to ensure meritocracy, for faculty to leave the mobbing-prone institution the soonest time possible, and for the state to create a mobbing law. It is recommended that democratic and transformative leadership styles be used and independent expert groups inspect universities.