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Introduction

The papers in this volume represent the continued emergence of an international learning community centred on health and wellbeing in the contemporary business school. The authors provide thoughtful critiques, diagnoses and reflections on the impact of culture, collegiality and leadership, along with insightful and impactful sector-wide research insights drawn from lived experience, and lessons from wellbeing interventions in global school and university case studies. Together these contributions demonstrate a sizeable gap between health and wellbeing rhetoric and reality in business schools. Wellbeing interventions are commonplace, but without accompanying system-wide change, they can often be limited to addressing emerging issues rather than root causes. This makes them challenging to implement, requiring sustained commitment and pragmatic expectations of success. Our contributors favour an integrated approach, with health and wellbeing culturally embedded rather than as an ‘add-on’, but to achieve this, we need to address wider system pressures and, in doing so, reflect on our own evidence base, not least the collective insights we have developed into the dark side of managerial cultures.

Our contributions show that while progressive actions can be taken on the ground, there is evidence of a credibility gap between our aspirations and potential achievements, in a context where institutionalised performance systems and field-level norms run counter to health and wellbeing. This situation not only serves to undermine our efforts to cultivate a collegial and flourishing environment in our schools but also presents a major risk to the legitimacy of business and management scholarship in the longer term.

Key insights and implementation challenges

A constraining institutional environment

As we have identified, wellbeing interventions tend to take the form of progressive, localised responses introduced in the face of wider institutional pressures. Our authors discuss how these institutional pressures impede our sense of purpose, run counter to cultural values and prompt doubt about the impact of our activities, especially our research. Many reference the ‘publish or perish’ system, which encourages scholars to adopt competitive, one-dimensional, and less collegial approaches to their work, while simultaneously prompting imposter syndrome, anxiety and burnout (Bothello and Roulet, 2019). They also reference the academic integrity challenges, ‘malpractices and misdirections’ the system has prompted, which Kong neatly elaborates in her analysis of “mistreatment, misconduct, and manipulation” in the field.

There is a keen awareness of global pressures and especially our focus on rankings and citations, and how competitive cultures have served to reduce collaboration and collegiality on the ground. As Suddaby and King emphasise, when citation rankings become a substitute for purpose and contribution, guiding principles are lost, and wellbeing erodes. For Yennek and Triki, this situation raises doubts about whether institutions can reconcile a managerialist approach with cultures that foster engagement, autonomy, and wellbeing among their members.

Several of our contributors reference the role of professional accreditation bodies, noting that their processes tend to drive conformity (e.g. in Lagos and Sasin) that diminishes distinctive aspects of culture, community and collegiality that support wellness, with a number recommending our accreditation agencies act to integrate and embed wellbeing within their evaluations.

Others highlighted the challenges for business schools operating within parent universities. Cornelius et al. detail the fragility of psychological safety across the higher education sector. Suddaby identifies how moral purpose and meaning have been diminished due to the phenomenon of ‘administrative bloat’ in universities, and especially business schools, producing situations of ‘managed collegiality’ and ‘thin proceduralism’. In contrast, Delbridge highlights scope for agency, documenting the pivotal mediation role that local leadership can play between university structures and the lived experiences of staff.  Naidoo describes the current context as “one of the most challenging periods in higher education – marked by tensions around freedom of speech, gender identity, and global conflict” – certainly not an easy time to be a university leader for people and culture. She recalls learning from “emotionally charged and often painful” discussions, which helped her develop “calm, fair and values-driven” responses.

Leadership, Collegiality, Community

Delbridge, Thomas and Ambrosini, and Suddaby discuss professional collegiality, governance autonomy, peer review, and human capital, emphasising the role of scholarly identity, humanity and community. The Delbridge study shows that “actions that prioritise the collective” are able to positively impact health and wellbeing through the provision of emotional and professional support, and collective problem-solving while collegial practices such as mentorship, support, sharing experiences and informal conversations also serve as wellbeing boosts.

Similarly, Thomas and Ambrosini call for greater mentorship, inclusion in decision-making, and a diverse range of voices to reshape the academic community. Our authors also identify different drivers for collegiality, which tend to rely on autonomy and agency. In Lagos, collegiality in the form of communitarian solidarity is enshrined in the constitution, at Woxsen, community contribution is a key expectation, whereas in Sasin, the ambition is “not to manage faculty wellbeing as a separate concern,” but to ensure strategic integration makes “meaningful faculty work possible.”  “Collegial, participatory, and nurturing leadership” was a factor in the Delbridge study, while Naidoo describes in some detail the three-dimensional approach she takes to encourage collegial discussions on wellbeing involving: a pan-university community of practice; innovation seminars where challenges are worked through collectively; and a solutions meeting where colleagues work on ‘stubborn challenges’ with senior leaders.

Uneven impacts

Our collection demonstrates that wellbeing impacts are not evenly distributed and describes how a series of vulnerable constituencies are overlooked and disadvantaged and, as a consequence, experience uneven treatment and endure unsustainable workloads. This includes, for example, professional staff (Smith and Safeer); women minorities (Cornelius/Grandy/Kong); ‘Zombie Academics’ (Thomas and Ambrosini); and students (especially graduate students). With respect to faculty, workload allocation provides a specific illustration of inequitable treatment, as Cornelius’ UK study demonstrates, and especially for women and minority staff, ‘channelling’ colleagues towards activities that are not always rewarded. Reb and Peters argue that students have also been overlooked, with attention to their health and wellbeing typically taking the form of reactive crisis support or being relegated to extra-curricular activity.

For Cornelius et al., this inequity “is not a matter of perception but of governance practices (rules, metrics, consultation processes, for example, about ‘invisible labour)” that determine whether fairness is enacted or undermined. In acting on this, leaders should resist ‘managing metrics’ (Suddaby) or satisfying external audiences via charter marks, as “only substantive measures that redistribute opportunity, make workload transparent, and hold leaders accountable can close the gap” (Cornelius et al.).  As a senior university leader, Naidoo reports a sense of responsibility to evaluate the way “cultural capital works to replicate patterns of exclusion” so we can develop agentic strategies and ensure opportunities for success are more evenly distributed. We also need to consider whether there are uneven impacts on leaders. Grandy’s reflections on the ways that health and wellbeing intersect with gender are important here. Having heard herself referred to as “the caring mother” of her School, she recalls being asked for a hug after a difficult conversation, and wonders whether other women deans experience particular pressure to embody these kinds of stereotypical behaviours.

Capturing success

Our contributions show that while change is possible, inevitably there have been implementation challenges, not least due to the wider institutional environment, as Naidoo’s ‘lived experience’ reminds us. Nevertheless, our papers provide evidence of progressive wellbeing initiatives, especially in the form of capacity-building and pedagogic innovations. As Reb and Peters describe, mindfulness is now core to the curriculum for SMU’s liberal management undergraduate programme and helps students to “notice and disrupt unhelpful mental, emotional, and behavioural patterns…and orient toward values, goals, and strengths.” Yennek and Triki also provide a detailed account of student-centred innovations, reporting some impressive early outcomes, as does Rodriguez, while Naidoo relays examples from her three-step approach that demonstrate an improved university response to issues of student harassment and staff EDI concerns.

Anand Narasimhan’s Mindfulness and Behavioural Cognitive Lab is part of the institutional fabric at SMU, although in his reflexive account, he reports mixed reflections on the impact of structured wellbeing interventions. On the one hand, he identifies a series of positive benefits reported by participants and, on the other, he recounts a pivotal incident where mindfulness sessions proved triggering. Helpfully, he weighs up these pros and cons of wellbeing interventions, while also identifying the significance of “small acts of human kindness made in real time.”

Understandably, we are at an early stage in evaluating the longitudinal impact of these initiatives. A Ministry of Education grant helped to support a rigorous evaluation at SMU, while MBS in Tunisia and Exeter in the UK have identified measures to capture the impact of their interventions. Smith and Safeer’s five million survey responses also attest to the impact of wellbeing initiatives in workplace contexts.

Our contributions offer data that evidences good participation in interventions and activity. The example of 700 staff and students joining the new mentoring scheme at Exeter University is a case in point, supporting a system designed to boost career development opportunities and combat loneliness. But given that we have tended to focus on diagnosis of root causes and the sharing of practice to date, and significant cultural shifts are likely to require a five-ten year time horizon, we will need to devote more attention and investment to evaluate wellbeing initiatives.

Limitations

This collection offers a variety of insights and contributions, but it was not possible to be fully comprehensive, and so there are gaps, with particular facets of health and wellbeing in business schools that might be further explored in the future. For example, with some key exceptions, our contributions mostly addressed health and wellbeing impacts for faculty, with slightly less attention devoted to interventions directed towards students and especially to professional staff. Equally, the papers have tended to consider health and wellbeing impacts in broad terms, and so our papers have not engaged in deeper discussions of mental health issues, impacts and outcomes, which, as we know, are becoming increasingly severe. This is especially the case for business school students who tend to exhibit higher levels of stress, anxiety and burnout, often falling victim to a ‘work hard, play hard’ mindset (Fiset and Robertson, 2023:2).  As Reb and Peters identify, we often fail to provide the personal development they require to deal with a complex and uncertain world, running a risk that they will “graduate technically competent but emotionally depleted, cognitively scattered, and disconnected from purpose.”

While several of our authors discuss aspects of EDI, we need to devote more attention to health and wellbeing impacts for those with protected characteristics and marginalised groups, especially in terms of intersectional effects. Many of our contributors were senior academics, often having held senior leadership roles. While most papers focused their discussions on other groups of colleagues, especially early-career academics, we do need to hear from a wider range of voices and institutions in future, including those of our professional staff.  Finally, the implementation studies in the collection report signs of success, but we need to invest in multi-method research that provides analysis of health and wellbeing initiatives in the short, medium and long-term. This should capture the lived experience of those working with wellbeing interventions and provide insight into growth trajectories and longitudinal outcomes.

Where Next on Wellbeing? Stark Choices and Collective Action

There are stark field-wide choices to be made as we move forward. We can continue to optimise performance metrics, accept credibility gaps and exploit vulnerable constituencies, while making laudable attempts to make change on the ground. Or, we can more proactively build purposeful, healthy wellbeing cultures, which requires clarifying purpose, strategy and meaning; building community and collaborative spirit; investing carefully and selectively; reforming governance mechanisms and building and orchestrating change strategically at a field-level.

Our authors have made repeated reference to the need to prioritise a sense of organisational purpose that foregrounds health and wellbeing. In Lagos, there was evidence that communitarian values strengthened and reinforced schools’ identity and purpose, which in turn helped to resist wider institutional pressures, with a similar story of integration from Ghorfi and Hatimi at ESCA, and at IPADE, where “wellbeing is embedded… not treated as an add-on.” Our authors describe the influence of our field-level instrumental, output-driven culture, which, it is argued, has directed our attention away from enhancing the public good in all four areas of business school operation – education, research, engagement and governance/operations (Kitchener, 2025). There is a consensus within this collection that this situation is not sustainable.

Suddaby reminds us that institutions can only endure if they integrate moral and technical elements and infuse their organisations with meaning, while Thomas and Ambrosini argue that business schools can only be credible institutions committed to the public good “if they reimagine success not as a race for outputs, but as a collective journey toward purpose, integrity, and human flourishing.” This takes us back to Grandy’s emphasis on “care, connection, engagement, and sustainability” and her recommendation to “talk about wellness, and invest in it, as a function of people, systems *and* space.”

To address this we will need to work collectively to confront logics that “prioritise publication quantity over quality, privilege the research destination over the journey (the research process), favour research over any other academic role, and are fixated on our individual academic achievements rather than our positive impact on our stakeholders” (Sathish and Harzing, 2025:2). Our authors offer various prescriptions here. For Cornelius et al., “closing this (credibility) gap requires more than symbolic gestures: it demands embedding fairness and wellbeing into the structures of workload systems, promotion criteria, and accountability frameworks” while Reb and Peters emphasise the need to return to our ‘deeper mission’, “to educate thoughtful, grounded, and self-aware human beings.” For Suddaby, the key to restoring moral purpose within business schools lies in crafting collegiality which involves “designing institutional spaces that reward reflection and dialogue, selecting leaders who embody moral stewardship, and embracing academic work as a craft through which meaning, not metrics, becomes the measure of value.” This will require leaders who not only infuse purpose into the life of others but can visibly enact purpose in their own practices (Kitchener, 2025).

The Need to Act

We have witnessed repeated ‘calls to action’, but in the spirit of Sathish and Harzing’s recommendation to act rather than to call for action, we suggest the following.

Scholars and staff within the business school field, and academic leaders of professional organisations, must coordinate so that we can remodel the meaning and purpose of business schools, drawing on innovative models and practices. Working collectively and collegially, we need to develop alternative and more rounded models of scholarly contribution and act more intentionally in this respect, drawing on the wealth of our own evidence.  As Bothello and Roulet indicate in their account of imposter syndrome in business schools, we must change incentives so business school academics are motivated “to act less as mercenaries and more as public intellectuals, loyal to institutions that promote and cherish a holistic contribution” (2019: 860).

Deans of business schools must do whatever possible to invest ‘intentionality, time and commitment’ (Delbridge) so they can develop purposeful, agentic strategies within their schools that embed health and wellbeing. This may involve the recruitment of different kinds of leaders, but at the very least, leadership development and personal approaches will need to adapt, with a recognition that empathy, resourcefulness, openness, and authenticity are key (Sindhawi et al., 2019). Given the number of policies and practices determined at the parent university level, deans will also need to work more closely with university leaders if we want to develop more fulfilling models of collegiality and restore meaning to our work.

We need a majority of business school faculty members (including the senior professoriate) to invest in cultivating horizontal collegiality initiatives, speak the truth, nurture one another and support collective action on metrics and governance mechanisms. Thomas and Ambrosini also suggest that early-career academics invest in being collegial by “supporting each other, speaking up in meetings, and celebrating each other’s achievements … they should also challenge toxic behaviour and question unrealistic expectations.” Additionally, there is scope for ‘subtle activism’ on all our parts, where everyday acts can challenge toxic norms without confrontation (Sathish and Harzing, 2025). Importantly, as both Delbridge and Cornelius et al. demonstrate, there are specific challenges in maintaining collegiality in the context of hybrid and digital working that need to be considered too in a bid to combat academic loneliness.

Our accreditation agencies have been making important incremental changes, but we now need a more transformative approach, which has humanity, belonging, diversity, health and wellbeing, rather than ‘excellence’, at its heart. This will require a willingness to pivot, ‘see around the corners’ and develop and commit to improving the quality and long-term viability of management scholarship and education, along with a willingness to pay greater attention to mental health (Fiset and Robertson, 2023). Finally, while individuals and business school associations have been attempting to influence journal and institutional rankings organisations, perhaps it is time for some bolder, collective action in this regard that may require disengagement from these systems at some point, as we have seen in some parts of Europe.

Final Thoughts

We believe that those who read and consider the insights from these papers, alongside evidence from the growing literature on health and wellbeing in business schools and beyond (including those from Professor Cary Cooper), will view this challenge positively and collaborate in taking action, which is essential to the long-term survival of meaningful business and management education, scholars and scholarship.

As scholars, we can take a range of actions to address this. We might support movements, such as Positive Academia referenced by Thomas and Ambrosini, which aims to disrupt the ‘vicious cycle’ by building a “academic heterotopia through a concrete, comprehensive, and coherent re-imagination of both our academic values and our interactions” (Sathish and Harzing, 2025). It might mean taking a form of ‘Aristotelian Oath’ advocated by Kong, which could commit scholars to ethical practices, and institutions to creating and maintaining healthy research environments. It could entail collective action through better coordination of business schools and their deans, which enables us to focus on ‘grand challenge’ as opposed to rankings, or warrant a personal commitment to normalising localised approaches that restore meaning within our work and ensure this is reflected within our recognition systems.

These kinds of actions are needed to ensure our organisations are better placed to transition towards purposeful, public value-oriented, collegial communities, with health and wellbeing at their core. As Korica (2021) emphasises in her call for a more humane academy, ultimately, the prospects for change come down to each of us: “A better academia is possible if we live it.”

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References

Bothello, J. and Roulet, T. J. (2019). “The imposter syndrome, or the mis-representation of self in academic life.” Journal of Management Studies 56(4), pp. 854-861.

Fiset, J. and Robertson, M.C.S. (2023). Navigating the support landscape: Bridging the divide between social support in business schools and student mental health. The International Journal of Management Education, 21(3), p.100897.

Korica, M. (2022). A hopeful manifesto for a more humane academia. Organization Studies, 43(9), pp.1523-1526.

Kitchener, M. (2024). Re-purposing business schools: potential, progress, and precarity. Journal of Management Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13171

Sathish, C. and Harzing, A.W. (2025). Let’s form a positive academia collective transformation: Re-imagining our academic values and interactions. Management Learning, 13505076251351089.

Sindhawi, S., Connor, J. and Thomas, H. (2019). “The Missing Shifts”, Global Focus, 13(1), pp. 52-55