Faculty service work: perceptions, influences and performance

Faculty service is part of a triad of academic work. The triad consists of teaching, research—also known as scholarship, and service. Using a conceptual framework centered on faculty’s identity, values and motivation, their academic disciplinary traditions, the institutional mission and the tenure and promotion reward system, this single-institutional qualitative case study sought to understand how faculty perceive of their service expectations and how they perform service as part of their academic work at a Catholic Jesuit university. A review of the history of faculty service in higher education was explored, along with various definitions of faculty service.

An adaptation of Weick’s (1995) sensemaking in organizations helped guide the analysis of the findings which revealed that faculty are strongly influenced by their departmental colleagues, notions of shared governance and personal values. A distinction between task and contextual performance of service was utilized to identify behaviors that support the organization, social, and psychological environment and are discretionary and extra-role oriented such as volunteering, leadership, interpersonal competence, acceptance of authority, usefulness and teamwork. Findings for question two revealed that faculty performed service out of a sense of duty, interest in promoting the institutional mission and shared governance with an individual variation in quality linked to effort and ability and an inequitable distribution of service across gender and minoritized faculty.