Mohan Dutta's reflections on the Academe

I am reading the chapter in the "Destructive Org Comm" book on guidelines for managers. Within academe, one of the most vital ways of creating a climate is figuring out whom you are hiring. However, here is the limit to the information we typically are trained to attend to in making our hiring decisions. So on a search committee, the first thing one will pay attention to (and I know that this is the first criterion I have used in search committees I have chaired and served on) is the academic vita of the applicant? Is the applicant going to be a productive colleague? Are they going to add to the productivity of the institution as well as productively work their career up toward tenure and promotion? This I still believe is perhaps the most important criterion, particularly if you are at a research-based institution that values research productivity as a marker of promotion and tenure. Having already established the importance of paying attention to productivity and the pote...

My colleague Beverly Davenport Sypher talks about the negative effects of incivility within organizations. One such fairly powerful form of incivility is spreading baseless rumors. That rumors can have powerful effects, I have experienced this in my own life, and have seen in the lives of colleagues and graduate students. Rumors can be debilitating; they can limit your productivity and affect you emotionally. Rumors can be powerful particularly in academic climates as professionally academics are taught to take their integrity fairly seriously. And yet rumors are only just as powerful as you let them be. The moment one chooses to treat the rumor as a form of incivility that ought to be treated as such (a form of incivil discourse), one curbs the capacity of rumor to have much of an impact. Beyond the individual response though, I also believe that as collectives, we have responsibilities toward dealing with rumors as forms of incivility. And here, I have once again also been on the...

As I reflect upon some of my personal experiences in working through relationships with faculty, I am left thinking about what the role of a leader is in building a culture that nurtures difference and positively encourages an open climate, creating spaces for the diversity of opinions on issues and simultaneously encouraging faculty to participate in constituting a highly productive culture as productive citizens (In such a culture, the productivity of colleagues acts as a catalyst and as an inspiration, not as a threat that provokes pettiness). On one hand, it is immensely encouraging to witness the tremendous potentials that might be created and sustained when you bring a group of smart and engaged scholars around the table, create resources for them, connect them up with exciting opportunities, and give them the room to grow by working with them to address the barriers they face. In such a culture, the individual growth of faculty members is facilitated by the inspiration and exa...