Executive summary. Business schools and their deans have been widely critiqued as embodying neoliberal logics of efficiency, performativity, and marketisation, raising questions about whether workplace wellness is even possible in such contexts. This article examines the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of cultivating a culture of wellness in contemporary business schools. Framed by an ethics of care, the article explores wellness as grounded in people, systems, and space, while acknowledging that change rarely feels comfortable. Foregrounding the self as a site of leadership, the article considers depletion, resilience, and the gendered burden of care experienced by women deans. It concludes with practical, reflexive commitments for leading wellness as ongoing, imperfect, and necessary leadership work.

Key takeaways

• Cultivating wellbeing in business schools is inherently difficult due to tensions between care and the dominant pressures of performance, efficiency, and market driven expectations, meaning wellness must be approached as an ongoing, imperfect leadership challenge rather than a fixed outcome.
• A sustainable culture of wellbeing depends on balancing people, systems, and spaces, including trust building, transparent leadership, supportive environments, and everyday practices that foster connection, while recognising that change and continuous improvement can create discomfort.
• Leadership plays a central role, requiring self awareness, attention to personal wellbeing, and the ability to navigate competing demands, including the often invisible burden of care, showing that wellbeing in business schools is as much about how leaders act and relate as it is about formal policies.

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Business schools, and the deans who lead them, have been critiqued as dark places with people bowing to capitalism and the principles of efficiency, outputs and career-readiness at all costs. Some academics working in business schools have even called for the ‘bulldozing’ of business schools (Parker, 2018) to put an end to these neoliberal entities (Fleming, 2019). Is it naïve as a dean to think wellness at work is even a possibility in a place where those who work there feel compelled to cry out in such despair about its existence?

I have always believed that an academic’s working life, and especially working in a business school, was one of great privilege. I still believe that, but I also recognise the context has changed. In an era of post-COVID exhaustion, heightened pressures for student growth in the face of reduced government funding, growing public criticism of universities around the value of a degree, and neoliberal tendencies to view students (and employers) as consumers for whom we must continually re-invent ourselves to serve their desires, there is no wonder that faculty and professional staff engagement is low and there is growing discontent. Now more than ever, cultivating a culture of wellness at business schools is critical, but likely never more difficult.

Wellbeing at work, as “the overall quality of employee’s experience and function at work” (Van De Voorde et al., 2012, p. 393), is often linked to happiness and associated with physical, social, spiritual, emotional and intellectual wellbeing (Samad et al., 2022). More broadly, wellness at work considers the individual and collective, and recognises there are psychological, physical and systemic dimensions (Danna and Griffin, 1999). As a dean navigating leadership, wellness, and culture transformation in a business school, I propose that cultivating a wellness culture is grounded in people and systems, and it doesn’t always feel good in trying to get there.

The Wellness of the School: People, Systems, Culture

Wellbeing at work is often described as the extent to which employees feel good and fulfilled in their job roles, characterised by positive affect, job satisfaction, purpose and functioning well in work life (Guest, 2017). Following this, a wellbeing-supportive organisational culture then fosters the conditions (e.g., resources, support, meaningful work, psychological safety) that promote wellbeing at work. While flawed as a construct, here I conceptualise wellness as considering wellbeing and dignity at work, and related concepts, such as care, connection, engagement, and sustainability.

If we start at the individual level, dignity at work is part of wellbeing. Dignity at work in business schools is built on trust. In an era where those who take on leadership roles in academia are often viewed as ‘moving to the dark side’, rarely is it assumed that the dean is trustworthy. The underlying assumption is that we have or will develop the “Dean’s Disease” (Bedeian, 2002, p.164), thereby making the dean suspect¹. That means we are starting from a place of deficit in building trust and dignity at work.

I served as Dean in one institution where I was an internal hire, promoted from an associate dean role into the dean role. I now serve as dean at another institution, as an external hire. There are differences in what building trust looks like and how long it takes in these two situations. As an internal hire, I knew the culture and the people. It doesn’t mean it was easy to build trust, or that trust was a given, but I was a ‘known quantity’, and it was generally easier to have conversations with colleagues about difficult topics without it eroding trust. For the most part, even when we disagreed about a decision I made, most people knew I was leading with the best interests of the school, and the people there at heart. In my current role, as a newcomer, my experience has been that building trust takes a long time and requires a lot of invested time by the dean and others holding leadership positions alongside the dean.

Wellness at work also ties to space, nourishment and health. Dunbar (2017) concluded that social or communal eating results in higher levels of happiness, life satisfaction, trust and engagement. While that research was conducted outside of the workplace setting, the same applies to business schools in building a culture of wellness. Indeed, food alone is not enough, but food does give people a reason to come together and engage in conversation. Through the informal exchange, we learn about each other and build relationships. In addition, being able to do so in spaces which are comfortable, fresh and built for purpose, supports this. When opportunities arise to engage in renovations, creating spaces where people can take pride in their place of work and come together in conversation and in health supports building a culture of wellness. On my initial listening tour in my current role, I heard from professional staff that the faculty-staff lounge was no longer a place where they wanted to go for a break or lunch (for a variety of reasons). Those comments triggered a closer look at our spaces and where we come together. Over time, we have invested in a new faculty-staff lounge with treadmills and stationary bikes, two new wellness rooms, a puzzle room and a games room. We are also exploring meditation training and virtual meditation practice available weekly for staff and faculty.

As a cautionary note, I have learned the hard way that even when making a space change intended to be for the better (e.g., better use of space, new furniture, better natural light), there can be a sense of loss for those affected. Engaging in many conversations with those affected will make the transition easier and ultimately lead to greater pride in place. As dean, and for others leading these initiatives, it can feel like those multiple conversations are unnecessary when your attention is being called for elsewhere. For those leading those conversations, there needs to be heightened transparency around the aspects which are information sharing and the aspects where there is an opportunity for consultation and input into the process. Those conversations can be arduous and draining. There will be push-back and even disappointment for some, but it offers a clarity that earns respect and trust over time.

A culture of wellness is also marked by continuous improvement as a learning organisation. This is often the hardest part of building a culture of wellness, because it triggers change, and can feel like it sits at odds with investing in people and job security. For me, continuous improvement can serve as a means through which to improve job security by building sustainable programmes, people planning and systems. That is part of the care associated with a culture of wellness.

De Vita and Case (2014, p. 359) argue that “organisational culture can be ‘smelt’ in any corner of the organisation, but it starts at the top of the hierarchy, where leadership sits.” Sitting from a place of privilege as dean of a business school in a research-intensive university, I suggest that if we are to cultivate a culture of wellness at work and specifically in business schools, it needs to be grounded in the complex context that we face, and thus building practices and systems to ensure business schools are sustainable. Such a stance on wellbeing is suspicious for many. As I reflexively think about what informs my perspective on this, it is at least in part informed by the seduction and embedded neoliberal tendencies that inform my leadership ways of knowing and being. From where I sit, however, with government funding to universities decreasing, costs increasing across the board, and tuition fees reaching a breaking point, to sustain the future of business schools, continuous improvement must be part of it. In that clear expectations around a learning mindset, accountability and shared responsibility can foster cultural wellness. Leading for wellbeing is the practice of juggling people care and systems care… a balance that is undoubtedly difficult to navigate, and we do not always get it right.

Being Well: The Self as a Site of Leadership

The resilience needed to balance people care and systems care means that as deans we also need to care for the self. Leading for wellbeing starts with the leader and self-care – as cliched as it seems, and perhaps even a bit narcissistic. That practice is ongoing work.

We all know that leader care is important, it’s obvious. Yet, I have often neglected my own physical and emotional needs in service to others in the practice of my leader identity. I continue to struggle with the nagging feeling of never being enough. At the same time, as an optimist, I have good reframing skills, and I am learning to accept the discomfort of recognising there will always be someone you disappoint as there are only so many hours in a day. This is indeed informed by gender expectations – those I place on myself and those projected by others. Alongside that, my ‘pacesetter’ (Goleman, 2000), and what some might view as neoliberal tendencies to lead with a focus on outcomes, creates an internal tension when trying to practice leading with wellbeing in mind. It also amplifies the felt imperative to find ways to simultaneously move the organisation forward and enact compassionate leadership, while risking depletion.

I was recently forced to literally pause for health reasons. During that pause, I reflected on my leadership practice and was reminded of the toll it can take on the leader as dean, and in one’s efforts to cultivate a culture of wellbeing and wellness. As the deadline for this piece loomed, I had to make space to deal with a health challenge. Fortunately, my health challenge is resolvable, but it has made caring for the self who leads particularly salient. Being and feeling healthy makes it easier to be our ‘best selves’. When we are our ‘best selves’, it is easier to lead and support a practice of leadership that is committed to the wellbeing of the individual, the collective and the system.

“Mothering” the Organisation: The Burden of Care in Wellness

As a woman dean and a scholar of women in leadership, it would be remiss of me not to reflect on how cultivating a culture of wellness can be intertwined with the gendered scripts of care and community. I would like to think colleagues describe my leadership style as a positive combination of: results-driven, accountable, tenacious, strategic, empathic, nurturing, and relational. A balance of doing gender well and doing gender differently (Mavin and Grandy, 2012; 2013). Depending on the interaction and decision at hand, I suspect most days, however, I am described as one extreme or the other in those terms. I have heard my leadership described as “there isn’t much warmth in the dean’s office” to “the caring mother” of the school. Neither of which I am particularly proud of, nor do they reflect the ideal to which I aspire as a woman leader in a business school. On more than one occasion, colleagues have even asked me for a hug following difficult conversations with them. Should such an expectation be placed on a dean? Can we, as women deans, cultivate cultures of wellbeing while not embodying those gendered expectations of care?

There is a tension between being viewed as a leader versus a nurturer, and that does play into how women deans can build a culture of wellness at business schools. My experience as a woman dean does not reflect the experience of all women deans in business schools. My lived experience is that the rules are different for us. While the gendered script of care isn’t uncomfortable or completely offensive to me, that expectation carries a burden. There are invisible costs to personal wellbeing and professional legitimacy for women deans in business schools as we cultivate cultures of wellness. All deans, women or otherwise, need to be aware of the potential costs of focusing on the wellness of others or the system, at the expense of self.

Concluding Reflections from an Imperfect Dean

As I reflect on nearly eight years of serving as a dean, I recognise that we have not yet fully cultivated a culture of wellness within my current institution—yet I remain (cautiously) optimistic that we can. I also appreciate that, in this work, both the process and the outcomes will not always feel good.

As we continue learning how to enact an “ethics of care” (Gilligan, 1982) in cultivating a culture of wellness in business schools, I offer the following reflections, shaped by my own imperfect practice. This is work that can feel uncomfortable and unresolved, but—as Cassell (2025) reminds us—it is leadership work that is both worthy and essential.

• Talk about wellness, and invest in it, as a function of people, systems *and* space.
• Be patient because building trust takes time. Be upfront with colleagues that you know it will take time to build that trust.
• Remind colleagues that trust is reciprocal. The responsibility of building trustworthy relationships is a two-way street. Colleagues need to trust the dean, *and* the dean needs to be able to trust colleagues.
• Be honest – there is care in clarity, even if it doesn’t feel good for you or others in the moment. It builds respect over time.
• Use your strategic plan to guide your decision-making – do it consistently and transparently.
• Share the responsibility across the leadership team so that trust doesn’t rest only with the dean – associate deans and other senior leaders also need to be communicative, consultative, transparent, listening, and responding.
• Respect the collegial process and remind academic colleagues that THEY decide the future and they need to take that responsibility seriously.
• Business schools are identity workspaces where professional staff, full-time academics and academic leaders, including deans, all expect and deserve dignity at work.
• Challenge colleagues to assume (your) positive intent, as they would expect you to do of them.
• Learn to be comfortable with discomfort in having difficult conversations – those where you explain that decision-making has to entail balancing the individual, collective and the system. Most people will ultimately respect you for doing so, and the ones who do not, you likely were never going to get on-side.
• Remind people that self-care, including your own, is important to building wellbeing in the system. In other words, as they say when you travel, “put your own oxygen mask on first.”
• Pause and ask yourself, are the expectations of care directed at the dean reasonable (whether gendered or not)? If they aren’t, have the courage to engage in those crucial conversations to realign expectations.
• Make your spaces welcoming and natural places to congregate.
• Use food as a way to bring people together. Feed people well and often!
• Invest in people (e.g., professional development; coaching).
• Invest time, A LOT of time to be visible and to get to know people (e.g., townhalls, drop by hours with the dean, celebrate EVERYTHING, acknowledge birthdays, illness, deaths).

Ultimately, building a culture of wellness is about more than policies or practices—it is about who we choose to be together with. It asks us to lead with courage, to listen generously, and to show up for one another even when the work feels difficult. My hope is that by embracing these commitments collectively, we continue moving toward business schools where wellness becomes a defining strength of how we lead and learn.

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Footnotes

1. Bedeian (2002) coined the term Dean’s Disease to describe how academic leaders lose touch with their colleagues and the values of collegiality as they become insulated from those who are willing to share differing views, they develop an inflated sense of self-importance and lose their tolerance to hear and take on board critical feedback.

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References

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Dunbar, R. (2017) Breaking bread: The functions of social eating. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 3, pp. 198–211.

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Parker, M., (2018) Why we should bulldoze the business school, The Guardian, April 27, Accessed November 5, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/27/bulldoze-the-business-school.

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Van De Voorde, K., Paauwe, J., and Van Veldhoven, M. (2012) Employee well‐being and the HRM–organizational performance relationship: A review of quantitative studies. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14(4) pp. 391–407.