Evaluation of a leadership development program to enhance university staff and student resilience

Abstract

University life presents challenges that can negatively affect the health and wellbeing of students and staff. Resilience is critical to managing challenges and thus is increasingly viewed as important for university students, graduates and employees. To date research on resilience has tended to adopt a view of resilience as an individual issue with little consideration of the socio-cultural factors that influence an individual’s resilience. To address this gap a leadership program to enhance both staff resilience and their capacity to lead resilience enhancements for students from an ecological perspective was developed. The program, piloted in three universities across Australia, assisted staff in understanding the nature and importance of resilience, the contextual factors that impact on resilience and the leadership practices that help drive change in the higher education context. Both academic staff and professional staff involved in leading co-curricula student experiences participated in the two-day leadership program. This study, part of a broader program evaluation, adopted a mixed methods approach to investigate university staffs’ levels of distress, resilience, and leadership practices. Pre- and post-intervention survey data indicated the program was positively received and most participants felt confident to lead curricula and co-curricula changes to enhance resilience within their work context. Implications for university educators, researchers and leaders are discussed.

Health and Wellbeing in Higher Education: A Comparison of Music and Sport Students Through the Framework of Self Determination Theory

“…Wellbeing measures have included various World Health Organization (WHO) measures (Helou et al, 2019;Philippe et al, 2019), the Warwick and Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS; Harding et al, 2019;Kidger et al, 2019), the Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationship, Meaning and Accomplishment (PERMA) profiler (Ascenso et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2020), the Satisfaction with Life scale (Samaranayake and Fernando, 2011;Moate et al, 2019) and various versions of Ryff 's Psychological Wellbeing Scale (PWB;Chraif and Dumitru, 2015;De Clercq et al, 2019). Unidimensional mental health measures have included the Beck depression and anxiety inventories (Yazici et al, 2016;Yüksel and Bahadir-Yilmaz, 2019), the Depression Anxiety Stress scale (Koops and Kuebel, 2019), and the Kessler scale of psychological distress (K10; Brewer et al, 2019). Multidimensional measures used were, for example, the General Health Questionnaire (Bore et al, 2016), the Personal Health Questionnaire (PHQ 9; Lipson et al, 2016), and the SF12 (Wilks et al, 2020).…”

Defining and Advancing a Systems Approach to Achieving Educator Wellbeing: An Integrative Review of Wellbeing in Higher Education

“…University programs focussing on staff wellbeing often prioritise the development of individual resilience as a solution to wellbeing (Brewer et al, 2019;McDermid et al, 2016). There are, however, limits to resilience as a response to facilitating wellbeing and a focus on individual personality traits and dispositions may overshadow consideration of the effect of the higher education operating environment and wider processes and conditions on wellbeing (Joseph, 2013;Loveday, 2018;Ross et al, 2022).…”

“…Indeed, while supporting academics' mental health and wellbeing has been framed as a priority, approaches have tended to be "more focused on corporatisation and student satisfaction while unconsciously neglecting its impact on the well-being of academic staff" (Ohadomere & Ogamba, 2021, p. 67). Performative wellbeing supports provided by universities may be well-intentioned but unless they address underlying structural factors at the frontline teaching, leadership and institutional levels, they realistically have little prospect of improving educator wellbeing (Brewer et al, 2019;Brewster et al, 2022;McDonald et al, 2022). This integrative review, informed by the NASEM model-which considers individual wellbeing in the context of the broader organisational and macroenvironment-demonstrates that applying a multi-layered systems approach to higher education wellbeing can assist in identifying these underlying structural factors, effective existing practices and gaps in the ways institutions support educator wellbeing.…”