CAREER ADVANCEMENT AND JOB SATISFACTION AMONG NON-ACADEMIC STAFF IN UNIVERSITY SETTINGS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP

Career advancement path of academic staff (also referred to as faculty members in this paper) is well spelt out in ranking for promotion policy guidelines. Emerging academic staff when well oriented into the academic arena, get to know what competences, skills and credentials to work on so as to move from one level of rank to another and within how much time. While rank equivalences exist for their counterparts, the non-academic staff‘s elaborate criteria on how to move from one level to another is usually lacking. Moreover, there are no clear guidelines for rank implications when one migrates from non-academic roles into academic roles. The disparity exists because of various reasons such as: limited financial resources, diversity of non-academic careers within universities and unclear appraisal mechanisms among others. Nonetheless, the need to have a career advancement path for non-academic staff is long overdue in addressing a major disparity between personnel of the same institutions. This is primarily an ethical issue in regard to human resource management. Ethical leadership therefore demands that this disparity is addressed even as higher education leadership seeks to create work environments where employees can thrive as they advance in their careers, regardless of their domain of operation, whether academic or non-academic. This paper therefore seeks to review literature on issues related to career advancement/promotion opportunities for non-academic staff, and their implications for ethical academic leadership in university settings. It is hoped that the discussions in this paper will lead to amicable solutions for clear and effective career advancement pathways for non-academic personnel in university settings