College faculty publish on higher education leadership

Colin Chesley and Jennifer Hunt, faculty in East Tennessee State University College of Public Health’s Department of Health Services Management and Policy, have authored an article in Tennessee Educational Leadership.  The article, “Organizational Culture and Congruence at Tennessee Institutions of Higher Education Before the Implementation of the Focus Act,” presents a baseline measure for the cultures of the six former TBR institutions within the state of Tennessee before the implementation of the FOCUS Act, which transitioned the university governing structure from a centralized orientation to a decentralized, local governance system.

Colin Chesley currently serves as associate vice president for Daytona State College.  Additional authors include Bethany Flora of Northeast State Community College and the late Jennifer Barber, former director of digital marketing at East Tennessee State University.

Passage of the Focus on College and University Success (FOCUS) Act by the Tennessee General Assembly in 2016 initiated major governance and organizational changes for the six universities that were previously governed by the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) system. The implementation of the FOCUS Act provided a natural experiment wherein the effects of major policy change in governance and leadership could  be tracked over time to see its impact on organizational culture.

The study by Chesley and Hunt was carried out to better understand the existing culture at each of the six universities, prior to the governance change.

Despite a common governing system through TBR the study identified very different cultures across the six institutions. An independent relationship existed between the organizational leader and organizational emphases, and another between the organizational cohesiveness and the organizational characteristics.

Future research should include a longitudinal study of these same institutions to track changes in culture and the organizations using these results as a baseline, and to inform policy makers about institutional effectiveness after such changes are made. In addition, it is possible to see if the organizational cultures become more or less congruent as a result of this change.