Abstract
With an unprecedently aging population and the abolition of mandatory retirement in many countries, management educators are remaining in their jobs longer than ever before; thus, it has never been more important to ask the question of: how can management educators remain effective and engaged while avoiding burnout throughout a career in the academy? The issue of aging well in management education is relatively under-acknowledged in the literature and we sought to move this topic into focus for higher education institutions and management educators. The interview we present focuses on the experiences of an accomplished management scholar and educator: Professor Emeritus and Full Professor, Gene Deszca. Dr. Deszca aged well as a management educator during his 37-year career at his institution until his retirement at the age of 69 and a half. The major themes from the interview suggest the benefits of interactions and relationships, autonomy, institutional support, and a willingness and ability to change. Based on these major themes, we provide implications for higher education institutions and management educators. It is our hope that management educators will engage with this interview and reflect on their own experiences while considering how they can age well throughout their career in the academy.
We are on the precipice of an important evolution in the academy as higher education institutions are experiencing the dual forces of an unprecedently aging population (e.g., Kulik et al., 2014) and the abolition of mandatory retirement in many countries (e.g., Henkens, 2022). It is likely that these forces will cause management educators to remain in their jobs longer than ever before. Further, there appears to be a continuing demand for management educators, which falls behind the available supply in some parts of the world (e.g., Ong, 2021). Despite these societal trends, the topic of how management educators can age well (i.e., avoid burnout while remaining effective and engaged) throughout their career in the academy is not receiving the attention it should from management educators and higher education institutions. It would be beneficial to higher education institutions to have their management educators remain effective and engaged until their eventual retirement. In order to bring the discussion regarding aging well as a management educator to the forefront, this article begins with a brief discussion of the relevant literature, presents the transcript of an interview, and concludes with a commentary including implications for higher education institutions and management educators.
The role of a management educator is challenging, especially considering factors such as the increasing difficulty in meeting the publication standards in place at the top journals in our field (Ashkanasy, 2010), not to mention the teaching and service requirements that are also a fundamental part of a job in the academy. Feeling burned out, unmotivated, and disengaged, whether through the frequent experiences of rejection during the peer review publication process (Edwards & Leigh, 2022; Jaremka et al., 2020) or perhaps through experiences such as low student evaluations of teaching or negative comments from students on course evaluations is cause for concern at higher education institutions.
Burnout has been defined in the literature as a condition consisting of feelings such as emotional exhaustion and cynicism (Maslach & Leiter, 2008). Conversely, engagement can be conceptualized as a condition consisting of feelings such as vigor and dedication (Schaufeli et al., 2009). Previous meta-analytic research has supported the notion that burnout and engagement are not necessarily unique constructs (Cole et al., 2012); rather, engagement can be conceptualized as existing on the opposite end of the spectrum from burnout. The consequences of faculty burnout in academe include negative implications for student learning and development as well as negative implications for faculty performance and health (Sabagh et al., 2018). Further, feelings of burnout amongst academics have been exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic (Gewin, 2021; Leigh & Edwards, 2021) and a previous special issue in the
Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2000) can be conceptually related to burnout avoidance and sustaining enthusiasm. According to SDT, when three basic psychological needs (i.e., competence, autonomy, and relatedness) are satisfied, motivation is autonomous or internally regulated as opposed to controlled or externally regulated (Gagné & Deci, 2005). Autonomous motivation has been found to lead to favorable outcomes, such as increased work performance and prosocial behavior (Gagné, 2003; Gagné & Deci, 2005). It is also likely that autonomous motivation as a result of the satisfied needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness will positively influence subjective well-being (Diener, 1984, 2000) in terms of increased happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect. Although well-being is an “essentially contested concept” (e.g., Collier et al., 2006), three categories have traditionally encompassed the varying conceptualizations of well-being: (1) possessing an externally desirable quality (e.g., virtue, success); (2) subjective evaluations of one’s life satisfaction and quality of life; and (3) pleasant emotional experiences (i.e., positive affect; Diener, 1984). The focus in this article is on the experiences of subjective well-being especially pertaining to life satisfaction, work satisfaction, and positive affect (Diener, 2000).
Also from a theoretical perspective, the job demands–resources (JD–R) model (Demerouti et al., 2001) suggests that burnout as opposed to engagement is likely to occur when the demands for a job (e.g., work overload, time pressure) outpace the resources provided to perform a job (e.g., career opportunities, task significance; Bakker et al., 2014). Initial findings pertaining to the JD–R model indicated that perceived excessive demands of a job are most strongly related to the emotional exhaustion component of burnout, whereas the lack of resources provided to perform a job are most strongly related to disengagement (Demerouti et al., 2001). Regarding consequences, it appears that burnout is most strongly related to health outcomes (e.g., psychological problems, physical problems) and engagement is most strongly related to motivational outcomes (e.g., willingness to learn new things; Bakker et al., 2014). A study that was conducted with a sample of United Kingdom business school academics provided evidence that higher demands for the job and lower resources provided to perform that job resulted in increased burnout and decreased retention rates (McCarthy & Dragouni, 2021). Overall, the conditions for burnout are apparent in the field of management education and further attention should be given to how to foster engagement as opposed to burnout for management educators, especially considering the conditions leading to management educators remaining in their positions for longer than ever before.
Mandatory retirement was abolished in the United States in 1986, in Canada (for most jurisdictions) by 2009, and in the United Kingdom in 2011. Coupled with a significantly aging population, the abolition of mandatory retirement is leading to a situation of an ever-increasing number of academics remaining in their posts well beyond previously typical retirement ages, especially when compared with the general labor force (Kaskie, 2017). Thus, the topic of how to age well during a career as a management educator is of increasing importance to consider. However, aging well in the academy can be described as a difficult, controversial, or “undiscussable” (Baker, 2004, p. 693) issue for several reasons. For example, discussing the engagement and motivation of tenured, accomplished, senior-level, Associate or Full Professors can be a sensitive and taboo topic; they have paid their dues, who are we to discuss their engagement and effectiveness? For reasons such as these, conversational learning (Baker, 2004) can be a helpful way for deepening our understanding of the issue of how to age well as a management educator, while at the same time helping to address the recommendation from Kulik et al. (2014) for management scholars, “. . . to participate in and shape the discussion on the aging population” (p. 934).
This topic is also of personal significance to me as during my first few years of employ as an Assistant Professor, I found myself wondering about the motivation of my more senior-level, post-tenure colleagues, especially when it came to remaining engaged in the later stages of one’s career. Early in my career I was asked to partner with the interviewee of this article to teach a core (i.e., required), MBA-level course on organizational behavior, which is the experience that prompted the idea for writing this article as the interviewee was an accomplished, senior-level Full Professor and MBA Director, and I was struck by his motivation and engagement in the later stages of his career. The interviewee is Dr. Deszca (https://www.wlu.ca/academics/faculties/lazaridis-school-of-business-and-economics/faculty-profiles/gene-deszca/index.html), who fits the criterion of being an impactful management scholar as he is a Professor Emeritus and Full Professor who has authored six books and over 100 papers. During his 37-year career at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada he served as MBA Program Director, Associate MBA Director, and Area Coordinator for the Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Area Group. Throughout his career, Dr. Deszca encountered major communication technology revolutions (e.g., the advent of email, the prevalent use of videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic) and worked with various colleagues and students from different generations. The following interview with Dr. Deszca will provide a unique opportunity to further the conversation pertaining to the important issue of aging well during a career in management education.
Interview
In what ways were you able to remain an effective and engaged management educator throughout the mid and late stages of your career?
I’ve been blessed with great health and am able to continue to do all the physical things I used to do; skiing, golfing, biking, hiking . . . those sorts of things. I think this has been most helpful, because of the impact it had on my energy levels, curiosity, and engagement with the world. A second area that has been really helpful has been the international experiences I’ve been privileged to participate in. These experiences regularly shook up my perspective and occurred in a more intensive way over a 20-year period, due to three sabbaticals, my annual involvement coordinating our international business concentration study tours, and international conferences. A third area has to do with my continued interest in research related to organizational change and case writing, which has helped to keep me current. Fourth, and likely most importantly, there are the interactions I have had with my students, both at Laurier and internationally, over the years. Clearly, the lived experiences of these students have changed over time, and I’ve been privileged to work with them while they were dealing with very different life experiences, such as families going through adjustments due to economic conditions, social changes, and other sources of disruption. Factors such as these can and will have an impact upon how we look at the world and how we look at work. Over the years, the changing gender and ethnic diversity of the student body have also contributed in major ways to revitalizing my worldview and reenergizing me. Finally, I think also about specific colleagues I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. Sometimes, these were older folks, and at other times younger individuals who were earlier in their career, including student research assistants. These relationships also provided opportunities for renewal.
One of the really wonderful things about the university career that I have had is that whenever I felt stale and stagnant, I had only one person to blame—myself. Over the years, my university career has provided access to all sorts of opportunities that have helped me reenergize and renew. These have included seeking out new courses to teach, different roles to play, different research thrusts, and all those sorts of things. I believe the choices made helped prevent me from getting stale. They have helped sustain my continuing interest in what I’m doing, as well as my energy, engagement, enthusiasm, and hopefully my competence and currency. I think these five areas have all helped to keep me young mentally and physically, and have allowed me to engage with students, colleagues, and the world in ways that would not otherwise have been possible.
What can be done to avoid burnout as a management educator throughout the mid and late stages of one’s career?
It certainly helps if you have a passion for what you are doing, healthy relationships with great colleagues and students, and institutional support in the form of leadership and resource access. When institutional support is missing or, worse yet, opposing initiatives you care about, I believe it can contribute to stress and burnout. On the flip side, too much energy and commitment, in conjunction with institutional support, can also lead to burnout over time, if you don’t learn how to effectively self-manage, including learning when to say no to an additional, interesting initiative. If I had not learned to better manage this area of my career over the years, I would have significantly impaired my relationships with my spouse and children and burnout would have been the least of my problems.
In what ways have your interactions with your students impacted your motivation and engagement throughout your career?
They have had a huge positive impact on my motivation and engagement levels. There are so many experiences that come to mind. For example, I remember one interaction with a female student who was interested in doing a research project that she referred to as involving the marketing of alternative furniture. I looked at her and said, “What’s alternative furniture?” This was a sector that was foreign to me. Over the course of my career, I have found myself regularly having interactions with students that have shaken up my thinking and caused me to say, “That’s interesting, I hadn’t thought about that.” I enjoy being challenged to think about things that lie outside my comfort zone, and I have loved those interactions over the years; they have been great fun. Other things that have been helpful in promoting these types of interactions have involved launching initiatives that engaged students in new and interesting ways. These include the design and delivery of the international business concentration, the design and launch of our full-time, 1-year, on campus MBA program, and our Toronto-based executive MBA programs, as well as the many 2-week international business student field trips I led over the years. All of these experiences provoked very different conversations with students and contributed in positive ways to my motivation and engagement.
How has using information communication technology (ICT; e.g., when email was first introduced, when videoconferencing was used during the COVID-19 pandemic) impacted how you interacted and engaged with your students?
Changes in communication technology create challenges and feel intimidating when you first attempt to adapt your approach, but I quickly came to appreciate the value of online course platforms and related teaching technologies for posting materials, updating in real time, connecting with students, and getting them interacting with one another and course materials both in-person and online. I’ve made lots of mistakes and am still making them but am now comfortable using this format and recognize the power it has for in-person courses, hybrid formats, and virtual. When I start using new technologies in this area, fears of stuffing up are pretty common, but thankfully I’ve had access to skilled staff along the way to help me learn. When technology challenges happen when working with a class and the staff supports aren’t available, I’ve found that students can often help me problem solve.
COVID certainly ramped up the challenges when it came to teaching technologies, because it was the first time, I had to deliver courses using only a virtual format. The first transition I had to make to this format was with small, professional development courses, delivered for members of a client organization. Getting comfortable with virtual synchronous delivery was pretty straightforward with these groups, due to small class sizes and access to excellent technical staff, when needed. Working with a larger graduate MBA class in South Africa was more challenging, but connectivity and technical assistance was good and a class size of 15 allowed me to see and interact with all class members most of the time. The most challenging experience I had occurred in 2021 for a French university. It involved the design and delivery of a virtual 1-week, intensive graduate business course for 46 students who were located around the globe. The only continent missing was Antarctica. The schedule had us meeting for two, 2-hour classes each day, so even though we tried to accommodate to this reality, the reality was that half of the times were bound to be far from ideal for half of the class. In addition to the scheduling, I couldn’t always see the students, except for when they were actively contributing to the discussion, when I would ask the speaker to turn on both their video and mic, if that was possible. Further, as you know, connectivity in some parts of the world isn’t all that great. In all cases, I quickly learned the value of using breakout rooms for interactive tasks, polling, and other approaches to engagement.
When it comes to teaching, regardless of format, I try to remain sensitive to the fact that student lived experiences are different from mine and I try to leverage those differences from a learning perspective, regardless of what delivery format I’m using. I remember the first time I delivered a three-day, in-person, organizational change program to senior managers in Abuja, Nigeria. This was many years ago and in spite of the assurance of the organizers, I was very unsure of how well my course materials, teaching, and experience would translate to the kinds of change issues and challenges they were facing. I remember giving voice to this concern and asking them throughout the program to let me know what materials and ideas resonated, what didn’t, and what were the realities of their change challenges. The interactions that emerged over the 3 days were very powerful and meaningful and contributed to a program that the participants found useful. I continue to use approaches such as this when I’m teaching, regardless of format, because I believe it enhances engagement and shared learning.
In what ways have you been able to remain motivated and engaged throughout the progression of your career as a management educator beyond your interactions with your students?
I found that as I aged and experienced some successes, I became more comfortable seeking out and taking on challenges that I thought I might be able to make a contribution to. Take, for example, how I got involved with the development and delivery of the undergraduate international concentration for fourth-year business students. About two thirds of the way through my career, I chaired an undergraduate business program review and one of the action items that emerged involved the need to create more international experiences for our students. I remember going to the Associate Dean and saying something to the effect of, “We know the report highlighted the need for more international experiences for our students. If you think faculty would be supportive of the development of an international business concentration, I’d be willing to take the lead and try to bring this to fruition.” I don’t think I could have or would have been quite as willing earlier on in my career to take on this challenge, but by then, I was tenured, I’d also worked with faculty to develop other programs such as our Toronto-based executive style MBA program and our one-year fulltime MBA program, and, most importantly, I felt the development of more international experiences for our undergraduates was important. What was the worst that could happen to me if it didn’t work out? Given that and my sense of the potential upside for our students if we were successful made the development of this international business concentration worth doing. I’ve been lucky to have had access to meaningful and interesting challenges at critical points throughout my career. These have contributed to sustaining my energy, enthusiasm, and personal development. I value ideas and colleagues that stimulate my thinking and I continue to enjoy getting involved in projects where I can hopefully make a positive contribution.
In what ways have you struggled or failed in your career as a management educator? What were the difficulties of working as a late career academic?
Let me address the second part of your question first. I was blessed with wonderful senior colleagues, and I never experienced difficulties working with them. Quite the reverse. They became important mentors and advocates and even when we would strenuously disagree on a material matter, I knew they had my back. They were one of the reasons I made Laurier my academic home. Hopefully I’ve been able to pay it forward over the course of my career.
Now let me turn to the first part of your question. Certainly, there were struggles and failures I had to navigate during my career. When I moved into the role of MBA Director around 1990, I was also learning to be a single parent with two young sons. On the professional front, the time available for research became seriously constrained and that remained true from that point forward. From that point on I struggled to find time for the research that had propelled my career to that point. Because of these factors I had to rethink priorities and reorient my approach to the more academic parts of my career.
I’ve always been pretty good at being able to think conceptually but I found certain research skills began to atrophy in the face of my administrative load and family responsibilities. I had to learn to be more selective and double down on teaming with people who shared interests in the various projects I wanted to be involved in. My research and writing interests shifted and I became more focused on case writing, matters related to leading and managing change, and my work with one of our national accounting bodies, in matters related to management and governance. I’m not an accountant but the leader of this body was an important mentor and advocate throughout my career. The subjects he had me become involved with over the years played important roles in my academic and professional development. As I reflect on that period in the early 1990s, the transition was initially hard on my ego because I was not publishing at the rate that I had in the past, but the support I received from valued colleagues and senior administrators smoothed the path and helped me get to places that I found most fulfilling. Certainly, there were other struggles and failures along the way, but we worked our way through them and learned from them. As I reflect on my career, there is very little about my journey that I would want to change.
You didn’t ask me this question but working with younger scholars such as yourself has been fun and energizing and something I wish I had done more of. One of the lessons I learned from older colleagues early in my career was to not view the debate of ideas or the competence of others to be something threatening. If you do, you’ll find it difficult to partner with individuals who can bring new perspectives and contribute things you may not be able to. That perspective has always been really helpful and helped me from becoming stale.
What were the factors that led to some people getting stale in the classroom? What are the lessons you have learned about aging well during a career as a management educator?
People I’ve seen who got stale in the classroom were unwilling to experiment with new approaches, continued to teach the same courses, and refused to shake things up from time to time. They underinvested in their development as an educator by continuing to rely on existing material and teaching approaches, and by under attending to the changing nature of the needs of their audiences. I’ve tried to avoid these traps during my career by shaking things up from time to time, continually being on the lookout for new materials and approaches, and taking on new teaching challenges.
What can be done in our systems, policies, and culture to foster motivation and to encourage management educators to age well?
My take on this goes back to experiences I had when I joined the university. We had a very different environment. It was much less of a transactional model; it fostered engagement, involvement, self-efficacy, and collegiality around what we were trying to do. It really felt like the administration and the more senior folks were interested in creating a culture where people were excited about their jobs as opposed to just focusing on how to maximize their returns. I think personal development and healthy aging over the course of one’s career are nurtured in a more collegial and performance-driven environment. Having the freedom to pursue what you are passionate about, combined with the sense that your efforts can make a positive difference can have a very positive impact on all concerned, so long as what you are trying to do is consistent with where the school ultimately wants to go. For instance, we used to have conversations with the Dean and others at council meetings where there was really good debate, a real sense of community, caring, and intrinsic motivation among the group. Disagreements didn’t lead to ostracization, and people had the sense that it was important to share divergent points of view. The school is much larger now, so it is all the more important to promote a collegial culture that nurtures the opportunity to have real conversations and increases the sense that organizational members have voice and agency, and are a part of a very important shared undertaking. I believe our school drifted away from our earlier culture over the past decade due to a variety of factors and became more transactional in nature. My sense is that collegiality, a shared sense of purpose, and other positive factors suffered as a result of this shift.
As for systems, the culture should drive the reward system, policy creation, and so on. There is really no merit in merit pay, I mean this is a group of high-performance, high-intellect, intrinsically motivated faculty; fouling that up with merit is one example of a system that speaks to a much more transactional, competitive, zero-sum environment than when I first started here. Things like reward systems and policies don’t seem that complicated on the surface, but boy can you screw it up. To promote a work culture that is both high performing and promotes aging well for all, we need to think from a macro level about how our culture, systems, and policies can work for everyone and can help to reinforce one another. We used to have more mentoring, reverse mentoring too, as well as more clarity about what we’re trying to accomplish; overall, a much more collegial environment, which I found helped me to stay motivated and engaged into the later stages of my career.
How have things been going since your retirement?
I’ve never had an interest in fully retiring and I held off leaving Laurier until I was almost 70. It was not about the money. It was about the stimulation. When I decided it was time to retire, I was starting to feel stale, and I wanted to mix things up. That has worked out really well. I’ve increased my involvement with the CPA (Chartered Professional Accountants) professional development programs, I’ve continued to teach organizational change in MBA programs in South Africa and France in intensive, one-week programs, and I do some consulting. I continue to do some case writing and we’ve begun work on the fifth edition of our book, “Organizational Change: An Action-Oriented Toolkit.” So, it’s a different mix of activities. I also didn’t want to work as many hours as before. So that was the other reason I decided to retire; I wanted to have more control over my time.
Commentary and Practical Implications
The purpose of this article was to take a conversational learning approach (Baker, 2004) to encourage management educators to reflect on how they can age well (i.e., avoid burnout while remaining effective and engaged) during a career in management education. As governmental policy and societal demographics continue to spur an increase in the number of management educators remaining in their jobs longer than ever before, these types of discussions and reflections will become increasingly important.
Four major themes emerged from the interview with Dr. Deszca regarding how to avoid burnout and remain effective and engaged throughout the mid and late stages of one’s career as a management educator. First, a theme emerged about interactions and relationships with students and colleagues. Dr. Deszca felt that he remained effective and engaged in part because of the interactions with his students and colleagues that caused him to learn new things or that otherwise challenged his existing way of thinking. He also mentioned working with earlier career scholars who brought new perspectives to his work as well as those who he partnered with for research projects that shared similar interests yet had complimentary skills. Dr. Deszca also appeared to benefit from relationships with senior colleagues who helped to mentor him earlier in his career and then advocate for him as he engaged in various roles throughout the later stages of his career. The importance of interpersonal relationships for well-being has transcended multiple domains of research (e.g., Gergen, 2009) and relatedness is a fundamental need from self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2000), which supports Dr. Deszca’s focus on interactions and relationships. It would be helpful for higher education institutions to encourage management educators to develop relationships that can help to enhance performance throughout a career in management education (e.g., through creating grants that encourage collaboration between earlier and later career scholars, through formal mentoring programs).
Second, Dr. Deszca discussed the impact of having the autonomy to seek out and engage in meaningful and interesting challenges. Some examples included engaging in various administrative roles (e.g., MBA Director), designing, delivering, and launching new programs (e.g., the undergraduate international concentration, various MBA programs), teaching and creating new courses, and partaking in new and different research and other scholarly endeavors. SDT provides a theoretical explanation as well as support for the notion that psychological needs, such as the innate need for autonomy, relate positively to motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Further, pertaining to engaging in meaningful and interesting challenges, continuing to set and achieve personal goals is one of the domains that has been identified as theoretically important for aging well in the workplace (Robson et al., 2006). Finally, it appears that autonomy as well as meaningful and interesting challenges increased the subjective well-being (Diener, 1984, 2000) experienced by Dr. Deszca as per the cognitive and affective happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect that were prevalent throughout the interview.
A third major theme from the interview was associated with institutional support. Dr. Deszca specifically discussed the impact of the senior administrative leadership (e.g., the previous Dean’s openness to having constructive conversations related to different viewpoints), a collegial, performance-driven culture, and resource access (e.g., having access to skilled technical staff as well as students for communication technology help). Regarding institutional support, the tenets of the job demands–resources (JD–R) model (Demerouti et al., 2001) would agree with Dr. Deszca’s responses regarding why he has remained engaged because engagement is likely when there are sufficient resources provided (e.g., social support, developmental opportunities) to perform a job compared with the demands for that job (Bakker et al., 2014).
A fourth and final major theme that emerged was related to a personal willingness and ability to change. Dr. Deszca discussed how he was willing to experiment with new approaches and material as well as how he was able to attend to the changing audiences and their needs over the years. Robson et al. (2006) found that adaptability (along with health) was the most important domain for aging well in the workplace. The more senior worker respondents in Robson et al.’s (2006) research indicated that the ability to adapt to changes was viewed as being an important criterion for aging well in the workplace, which supports Dr. Deszca’s focus on being willing and able to change throughout the course of his career in order to avoid burnout and remain effective and engaged.
In addition to the aforementioned major themes, several minor themes also emerged from the interview, such as Dr. Deszca’s developed ability to effectively self-manage and say “no,” a passion for what he was doing including his research, his international experiences (e.g., the international business student field trips he led), and his physical health. Self-efficacy expectancies (i.e., beliefs in one’s competence) are positively associated with health (Bandura, 1997). Further, previous research has found poor health to be an outcome of faculty burnout (Sabagh et al., 2018) so perhaps it was the absence of burnout in Dr. Deszca’s career that led to his physical health (and not the other way around). Regardless, higher education institutions should seek to develop programs for helping to encourage and facilitate the favorable physical health of their faculty so that they can mitigate burnout and disengagement (e.g., free and encouraged use of the on-campus fitness facility, offering subsidies for sports leagues and other physical activities).
In terms of limitations, Dr. Deszca’s reflections may have differed from his experienced reality (e.g., past challenges) as, consistent with process-relational ontology or “process philosophy” (Oliver & Gershman, 1989), the passage or flow of time can impact one’s ruminations of the past. It is also possible that Dr. Deszca’s experiences are unique from management educators who are working as part-time faculty or in positions that are contractual and untenured; it is feasible that faculty in these types of positions would require different strategies for sustaining enthusiasm and productivity. Future research should assess whether there are any gender-related differences pertaining to the themes that emerged from this interview as well as Dr. Deszca’s experiences. Lastly, it might be interesting for future research endeavors to address the question of whether late career burnout is less common in academia compared with other work environments.
Additional Implications for Higher Education Institutions and Management Educators
The fact that higher education institutions have an increasingly more senior faculty contingent (Kaskie, 2017) is a primary reason for the need to have management educators reflect on how they can age well, remain motivated, and avoid burnout during a career in management education. These types of implications may be especially important for mid and late career faculty as Kulik et al. (2014) note that it is typical for organizations to focus their efforts on motivating earlier career professionals. There are obvious issues related to faculty burnout, which include the negative effects on student learning, faculty performance, and faculty health (Sabagh et al., 2018). Consistent with the tenets of the JD–R model as well as the interview with Dr. Deszca, higher education institutions would benefit from providing their management educators with resources, such as participation in decision-making, collegiality, autonomy, and social and institutional support. Further, as per SDT, it would be advisable to ensure that faculty needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are satisfied in order to foster their well-being.
The interview as well as previous research (e.g., Robson et al., 2006) suggest that institutions should help their more senior faculty members identify and strive toward personal goals. Several of the themes from the interview were related to the domains identified by Robson et al. (2006) and thus, higher education institutions should focus on helping their late career faculty to not only continue to set and strive toward personal goals, but to also adapt and remain healthy (health and wellness programs were also recommended by Kaskie [2017]), foster positive workplace relationships, advance and remain competitive, and feel personally secure and comfortable with their workload.
Higher education administration should also think carefully about the type of culture that they are trying to create; for example, as recommended by Jaremka et al. (2020), it would likely be beneficial to create a culture that destigmatizes and encourages regular discussions regarding burnout. Further, the cultural and structural recommendations from Jaremka et al. (2020) also dovetail with some of the themes from Dr. Deszca’s interview; for example, providing reminders about the importance of work–life balance and providing training to emphasize support and collaboration as opposed to competition. Lastly, consistent with the interview, McCarthy and Dragouni (2021) make the case for moving away from the evermore prevalent “metrics” culture in business and management schools and toward a more collegial and engaged culture.
Conclusion
Overall, there are likely to be individual differences pertaining to how to age well as a management educator; regardless, it is our hope that this interview and the surrounding exposition and commentary will lead to more consideration in academe regarding how to replace emotional exhaustion and cynicism with vigor and dedication, especially during the mid and late stages of a career in management education.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
