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Surviving and thriving in “accelerating” academia: toward a job demands-resources model of faculty well-being

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Abstract

The managerial policies of higher education have caused important structural changes in terms of the casualization of academic labor and the acceleration of academic life, which have been detrimental to university faculty well-being. Despite the emergence of empirical studies adopting the job demands-resources (JD-R) model to examine the antecedents of university faculty well-being, more sophisticated studies focusing on variables critical for university academics in “accelerating” academia are urgently needed, given both the “super-complexity” of changing academic work environments and the heuristic nature of the JD-R model. This questionnaire investigation involved 1498 faculty members from 26 Chinese research universities and revealed that job demands have a significantly positive influence on both emotional exhaustion and organizational commitment. Moreover, the findings highlight the centrality of psychological empowerment in understanding the relations between job demands, job resources, and university faculty well-being.

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Acknowledgements

We want to express our sincere thanks to all the participants who spared time to participate in this survey and we are very grateful for their contributions to this study.

Funding

This study is supported by 2021 Annual Key Projects of Zhejiang Province Association for Higher Education [KT2021035].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China

    Yating Huang

  2. Institute of Education, Tsinghua University, Room 329, Wennan Building, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Chuanyi Wang

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  1. Yating Huang
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  2. Chuanyi Wang
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Correspondence to Chuanyi Wang.

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Huang, Y., Wang, C. Surviving and thriving in “accelerating” academia: toward a job demands-resources model of faculty well-being. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-022-09769-2

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