Higher education crisis leadership survey now in progress nationwide
We are a team of researchers who are investigating the future of crisis leadership at higher education organizations in Finland. Thanks to funding provided by the Finnish Work Environment Fund and the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, we are exploring the past and present crisis experiences of higher education leaders and workers across Finland, with the goal of developing recommendations that will facilitate continued operations during future crises. A particular focus of our project is to examine how to ensure the well-being of all higher education personnel during future crises. In this post we will share the latest development in our project: the release of our nationwide survey of higher education crisis leadership in Finland.
The goal of our survey is to elucidate the current state of crisis leadership at higher education organizations in Finland. The survey is being distributed to all leadership (academic and administrative) from department chairs and heads to rectors and CEOs at more than 15 universities and universities of applied sciences across Finland (roughly half of all universities and universities of applied sciences in the country). The survey uses both multiple choice and open ended questions to ask leaders at these institutions to reflect on their prior experiences of crisis, the ongoing preparation for crises occurring at their organization, and how to improve their own and their organization's ability to cope with future crises.
Our survey was developed by combining existing crisis leadership literature, prior crisis surveys, and results from ongoing panel discussions with Finnish higher education workers. Multiple members of our team were responsible for conducting surveys of Finnish university academic deans’ perceptions of crisis leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Pekkola et al., 2021 and Pekkola et al., 2023), and the questions in those surveys served as a starting point for this work. To expand the scope of our survey we looked for themes in published crisis leadership literature as well as our own extant datasets that we have collected regarding the experiences of higher education workers in crisis.
To ensure that our survey reflected the present day experiences of higher education workers across Finland, we held panel discussions with 30 workers involved with higher education in Finland. These 30 workers represented a diversity of roles, including organizational leadership, teaching and research staff, professional and expert staff, and workers in organizations that support higher education. The panelists were from 11 different higher education organizations (7 different universities and 4 different universities of applied sciences) as well as 5 other organizations (ARENE, Ministry of Culture and Education, FUURT, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, and UNIFI). Roughly 15% of the panelists had an international background. Panel discussions asked panelists to reflect on a broad array of topics relating to crisis leadership, and input from these panels was essential for developing the survey. Three panelists representing the three different organization types were asked to provide feedback on a draft of the survey.
The survey is bilingual (Finnish and English) and is being administered anonymously via JYU’s Webropol service. Research permissions were obtained from all institutions requiring one prior to distribution of the survey. The survey is being distributed primarily via a single contact person within each organization (who is sharing the survey either via direct emails to leaders or through intranet postings), though at five organizations leadership email lists were obtained and leaders were directly emailed by the research team.
The survey was released on February 26, 2024 and is currently planned to close on March 10, 2024. The results will be published on August 1, 2024.
