Universities appear to be struggling to manage these days – and for once it’s got nothing to do with funding.

Managers across the sector may be feeling pretty demotivated if they’ve read Times Higher Education (March 27). It reports that university staff have accused managers of being reactive, secretive, inconsistent, demotivating, controlling, indecisive, inaccessible and uncaring.

Employees in ten sectors were questioned about the leadership styles of senior managers, in the Coventry University Work-Life Balance 2007 survey. Higher education managers got the worst rating in the survey of 2,300 staff.

University staff are more likely to say they have been bullied and to report stress – a quarter say that they feel stressed all or nearly all of the time compared with 19 per cent elsewhere in the public sector.

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Roger Kline, the equalities officer for the University and College Union, tells the paper: “The report confirms the results of our own surveys, which show [that] there is an epidemic of stress and bullying arising out of poor management.”

Elsewhere The focuses on how universities are beefing up their HR departments thanks to £330 million of government cash. And yet, says William Archer, three years after he produced a report called Mission Critical? Modernising Human Resource Management in Higher Education, academics are not focused on people management. He says: “There aren’t many people who consciously go into higher education... to manage.”

And universities lag behind in using HR initiatives such as performance-related pay to attract staff. Archer says that some financial reward packages are still “very old-fashioned” and that universities are “far out of step with the private sector and also [with universities] internationally”.

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