The global neoliberal transformation of higher education has had a profound impact on the academic profession as well as on faculty occupational well-being. Numerous studies have described negative effects of this transformation, demonstrating, for instance, a considerable increase in stress and burnout levels among academic faculty (e.g., Kinman & Jones, 2019; Kinman & Wray, 2014; Zabrodska et al., 2018). These longer-term challenges experienced by academic faculty have been more recently multiplied by the global “polycrisis” involving cumulative negative effects of the pandemic-induced, environmental, geopolitical, and other crises on the higher education sector, the faculty and the students (e.g., Marinoni, Van’t Land, & Jensen, 2020). Therefore, understanding and promoting resources of both individual and systemic resilience in face of these adversities is vital.

In this presentation, we draw on the concept of “organizational resilience” (Reatze et al., 2021), defined as the capacity of an organization to successfully respond to adverse events, to adapt to such events, and to grow. Applying the concept of organizational resilience to the higher education sector, we argue that academic culture represents a central component of organizational resilience in universities. Based on this proposition, we explore how academic culture/s can influence organizational resilience in public universities. More specifically, our aim was to identify specific academic cultures in transforming higher education and to examine the effects of these cultures on universities’ resilience, i.e. the capacity of higher education institutions to successfully cope with adversity and to buffer against future challenges.

The presentation integrates qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 60 university faculty members and analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021). The quantitative data were collected via an online questionnaire among university faculty (n=2,229). The questionnaire involved the Organizational Climate Measure (OCM; Patterson et al., 2005) as an indicator of departmental cultures, as well as the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQII) to measure other aspects of university work environments. The OCM dimensions were processed by k-means cluster analysis. The data were collected in the Czech Republic, as an example of a transforming Central European higher education.

Based on both the qualitative and quantitative analyses, we identified four types of academic cultures: “self-actualization culture”, “collegial culture”, “performance culture”, and “fraternity culture”. These cultures differed significantly in the OCM dimensions of internal–external orientation and low–high control, and had significantly different effect on faculty occupational well-being (Mudrak et al., 2022). In the discussion, we consider how these dimensions and related values may influence the organizational resilience in universities and we propose measures to enhance such resilience.

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