Can you feel the change of seasons? Perspectives of academic staff on organizational change

ABSTRACT

Research on academic staff experiences with mergers in higher education points out that they often struggle with the change process. Reform appears to go hand in hand with uneasiness and even anxiety, but studies also report mixed results: part of those involved share concerns, others report positive experiences. This study on mergers in Norwegian higher education uses a survey among academic staff, enabling us to compare the experiences of academic staff at merged institutions with staff at institutions that did not merge. We find that academic staff at merged institutions are less positive about developments within their study programmes and research units compared to those not having been part of a merger process. Further fine-grained analyses show that both background characteristics of respondents and discipline play a role as well. Our contribution to the literature on mergers is that attention should be paid to the background characteristics of academic staff, for these factors are important to understand impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Norway
• mergers
• impact
• academic staff
• experiences

Acknowledgments

We thank the respondents for taking their time to fill out the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The paper is part of the research-based evaluation of the Structural Reform, funded by the Research Council of Norway, grant number ES645248.