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This paper aims to examine the influence of individual and organizational variables on the career advancement of academics in Malaysian private universities.

A correlation study was conducted in six private universities. Data were collected using a structured self‐administered questionnaire. The dependent variable was academics' career advancement and the independent variables were individual and organizational factors. Using stratified random sampling, 105 full‐time academics were chosen as the study respondents. They represented sampling criteria such as pure science and social science disciplines, job positions and academic qualifications.

Regression analysis showed that organizational variables, specifically mentoring, social network and organizational support, were the significant contributors to the career advancement of the academics with 56.1 per cent explanatory power. These results are useful to human resource development (HRD) personnel of the universities as guides for them to plan and implement HRD initiatives.

This study contributes knowledge to career advancement among academics in private universities. These institutions are rapidly expanding in Malaysia to cater to the needs of achieving the entrance of 40 per cent of the population into tertiary education by the year 2020. At the tertiary education level, HRD is important specifically to create better awareness among academics about their career planning and aspirations, the role organizational‐related factors have in their careers and how they should respond to the services given by the institutions.

The paper examines factors (limited to individual and organizational factors) that are of concern to HRD managers in managing the career advancement of academics in rapidly developing private universities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social capital factors of career advancement of female academic staff in Nigerian universities.

A measurement and structural analysis were conducted for the three independent variables and a dependent variable on 20 public universities. Data were collected using a structured self-administered questionnaire. The dependent variable was female academic staff career advancement and the independent variables were mentoring, networking and government machinery. Using stratified random sampling, 532 academic staff were selected as the study respondents. They represented sampling criteria such as federal and state universities.

Structural modeling analysis showed that social capital variables, specifically mentoring, networking and government machinery variables, were significant contributors to the career advancement of the female academic staff in Nigerian universities.

This study creates an insight into the knowledge of career advancement among female academic staff in public universities. These institutions dominate the university system in Nigeria and serve as the main avenue for university education in the country. At the level of higher institution, HRD is significant, particularly in creating awareness among academic staff about their career planning and aspirations, the role that the perceived environmental factors play in their advancement to higher positions in the university and how they should further utilize those factors.

The paper examines social capital factors (limited to mentoring, networking and government machinery) that are of concern to managing the career advancement of female academic staff in public universities.

The purpose of this explorative study is to investigate through the lens of gender the role of career shocks in career advancement experiences in academia. By taking a contextual approach, this study increases understanding of the role of the academic career script as a potential boundary for career shock implications.

The authors studied career advancement experiences of a cohort of 75 men and women associate professors in the Netherlands via biographical interviews and conducted theoretically informed inductive analysis.

The analysis revealed the ambiguities and contradictions in the role of most career shocks in career advancement experiences. Failure to fit the majority of career shocks into the “rigid” academic career script generates discretionary latitude in handling shocks. These shocks pose unique barriers – and to a lesser extent unique benefits – to women's perceived opportunities for career advancement.

Academic organizations should focus on cultivating more inclusive work environments with respect to career shocks. The 75 diverse biographies offer leverage to challenge traditional notions of academic career advancement.

This paper extends “structure and agency” literature on career building by showing how career shock implications are inherently contextual in the academic setting. Gendered support provisions for handling career shocks offer a novel explanation for the numerical minority of women in academic leadership.

This chapter explores the influences of Vietnamese culture coupled with national policies on gender equality on academic women’s advancement into senior leadership positions.

In-depth interviews with 20 mid-level women leaders and five top-level leaders were conducted at four different higher education institutions in the Mekong Delta (MD) in southern Vietnam. In addition, document analysis and participant observations contributed to the overall analysis, which allowed for the cross-check of data from multiple sources to investigate the participants’ understanding, perception, conceptualization, and interpretation of their experiences of advancing in their careers.

Findings show that there is a large gap between the policies and gender practices. Gender equality does not exist in reality, regardless of tremendous efforts from the Vietnamese government and policy makers to ensure it in all spheres of life. Additionally, patriarchal hierarchy remains dominant in the institutional administrative system, and Vietnamese Confucian ideology continues to confine and adversely affect both men’s and women’s perceptions of women’s social roles, status, and forms of social participation. Nevertheless, academic women still develop professionally and find their own ways to advance to a few key leadership positions at their institutions.

The sample of this study is limited to academic women in the MD in Vietnam. Future research should include more women and universities and colleges, from not only the southern part but also other regions of Vietnam. Further, international and comparative studies should be conducted to see differences in experiences of academic women from several Southeast Asian countries as they move up their career ladder.

Because there have not been any empirical studies about women and leadership in academia in the MD, this study serves as a resource and foundation for improving gender policies and practices as well as future research on this topic and gender issues of colleges and universities in Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the attitudes, skills and knowledge-based researchers’ competencies (ASK-RC), academic affiliation (AA) and knowledge management (KM) and its effect on promoting the growth of scholarly international publications (SIPs).

This research takes a quantitative approach relying on primary data gathered through a questionnaire-based survey. The study’s target population includes lecturers, managers and researchers involved in research activities in educational institutions. To operationalize the research framework, this study used social cognitive theory (SCT) and the academic community served as an empirical field of study.

The primary findings of this research are twofold: ASK-RC and AA are positively and statistically significantly associated with SIP; KM moderates the influence of ASK-RC on SIP.

This research adds to the current body of literature on research productivity by providing new information and empirical evidence on improving research productivity and international publication. Moreover, this research offers a new approach to the existing literature stream by operationalizing an underexplored framework from the lens of SCT. This study explains why scientific research productivity is becoming increasingly important to academia and stakeholders. Because scientific works are motivated by the goal of addressing general socioeconomic and environmental concerns, it is possible to address this concern based on SCT. Therefore, this research offers theoretical and managerial implications that may interest academics, professionals and policymakers.

Arab female academics struggle to advance within their universities in both academic and managerial ranks. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the factors hindering Arab women’s academic career development through studying the case of Jordanian academic women.

Data were gathered through document analysis (Jordan constitution, Jordanian Labour Law and its amendments, higher education and scientific research law, Jordanian universities’ law and universities’ HR policies and regulations), interviews with 20 female academics and a focus group with 13 female academics (members of the Association of Jordanian Female Academics).

The results indicate female academics as tokens facing many interconnected and interrelated barriers embodied in cultural, social, economic and legal factors. The findings support the general argument proposed in human resource management (HRM) literature regarding the influence of culture on HRM practices and also propose that the influence of culture extends to having an impact on HR policies’ formulation as well as the formal legal system.

The influence of culture on women’s career development and various HR practices is well established in HR literature. But the findings of this study present a further pressure of culture. HR policies and other regulations were found to be formulated in the crucible of national culture. Legalizing discriminatory issues deepens the stereotypical pictures of women, emphasizing the domestic role of women and making it harder to break the glass ceiling and old-boy network.

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of a new leadership development course for academic medical faculty.

In October 2006, a survey was electronically sent to the 55 faculty attending the Leadership Course for Junior Faculty.

A total of 29 women and 26 men attended a course; 85.5 percent responded to the survey. The course was reported to be beneficial personally and professionally to 88.0 percent and 84.0 percent of women, motivated 47.8 percent of women to seek a leadership position, and helped to secure a leadership position for 30.4 percent. This was comparable with the survey responses of men. Women were significantly more likely than men to seek academic career advancement (83.3 percent versus 55.0 percent, p=0.04) as a result of attending the course. However, women were significantly less likely to have secured a new leadership position since attending the course in comparison with men (4.2 percent versus 18.2 percent, p=0.04). This course also motivated 24.0 percent of women compared with 9.1 percent of men to take additional leadership courses (p‐value not significant). All of the women and 25/26 of the men faculty (46/47, 97.9 percent) reported that they would recommend the leadership course to junior faculty.

Formal training in leadership skills early in an academic career is professionally and personally beneficial to faculty. In particular, leadership courses can successfully motivate and encourage junior women faculty to seek leadership roles in academic medicine by providing them with the knowledge of opportunities in leadership and the skills required for such positions.

The paper presents a subjective assessment of a new leadership course.

This study addresses gender composition in universities. The purpose of this study is to define the vertical and horizontal gender segregation in both public and private universities. In particular, it measures the gender distribution throughout academic careers across levels and time, and among fields of science in Italian academia.

The authors adopted the framework of Blackburn et al. (2002) as a theoretical lens through which they examine and explain occupational gender segregation in the university context. A mixed methodology of both document analysis and examining some statistical indicators was used to create gender-disaggregated measures to help the authors answer their research questions. The data collected represent academia in Italy for the period 2010-2018. The data were obtained from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research.

The authors show the gendered nature of academic institutions in Italy. In particular, the authors acknowledge that hierarchies of power exist that privilege men and the masculine and devalue women and the feminine within academic institutions.

This paper provides theoretical and practical findings that support the literature on gender issues in universities and other public and/or private institutions. The academic community, practitioners and policymakers can use the results to design measures to address gender inequality in academia.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is novel because it provides gender-relevant insights on the gender composition in universities in the Italian context. These insights are also relevant for academic institutions that operate in an international setting.

This paper aims to explore how female academics use cronyism to cope with the lack of emancipative support resulting from their intense teaching and research duties, poor representation at senior administrative levels and their exhausting familial commitments.

Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 female academics working full-time at four public universities in Egypt.

The findings showed that the low action resources (considering their unreasonable teaching loads, research requirements and supervision engagements), emancipative values (the unfair representation of female academics at senior administrative levels) and civic entitlement (universities not serious about promoting gender equality) are perceived by female academics as a lack of empowerment that necessitates their adoption of cronyism as their main coping strategy. Moreover, in male-dominated societies, female academics who do not have the power to shape their work-related status tend to use undesirable behaviours such as cronyism to mitigate the negative consequences of the shocks they encounter.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in human resources management in which empirical studies on the relationship between cronyism, emancipation and career shocks have been limited so far.

This study aims to address a paucity of research into career success by exploring the impact of organizational context (“in-group” culture and the competitiveness strategy) and individual variables (self-efficacy and goal orientation), on objective career success (academic position) and subjective career success (career satisfaction).

Survey data were obtained from 447 faculty members employed by Babeș-Bolyai University (BBU), the best-ranked Romanian higher education institution. For analysis, hierarchical multiple regressions analyzes were used.

The novel results of this quantitative analysis are that organizational context variables influence both subjective career success and objective career success. Academics who do not attain promotion have lower subjective career success and objective career success, as a result of the publish or perish university strategy. Self-efficacy has a positive impact on both success types, while goal orientation is for subjective career success a weak predictor.

Organizational efforts should be focused on improving academics career development especially for those teachers who are in the current position already for many years. The development of performance-driven career paths should be also considered for diminishing the impact of organizational variables.

This paper extends the knowledge concerning objective and subjective career success by revealing the important impact of contextual determinants, as it confirms the impact of individual self-efficacy in a university context and partially the one of goal orientation.