Student Affairs Work as Boundary Spanning: An Exploratory Study.

Boundary spanning is a concept developed and used in organizational theory but rarely applied to education. A survey of activities that spanned institutional boundaries was adapted to student affairs and used to assess the efforts of 42 senior student affairs officers from public universities in the Southeast. All participants indicated that they engaged in the eight boundary spanning activities at high or moderate levels. Implications for both theory and practice of boundary spanning in student affairs are discussed. Student affairs work occurs in an environment of competing demands, constant change, and often ambiguous actions. A constant flurry of information, ideas, actions, and people interact within colleges and universities. Daily interactions include a diverse array of individuals and groups, including students, faculty, administrators, alumni, parents, or local, state and federal stakeholders. To be effective, student affairs administrators must be able to shift focus and maintain a broad institutional perspective. These activities may best be described by the concept of boundary spanning. According to Miles (1980a), boundary spanning is the act of crossing organizational boundaries. Boundary spanning can be defined as the intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational transfer of information, ideas, resources, and even people across boundaries (Pruitt, 1995). In the case of a university, boundaries include the demarcations between internal sub-groups, e.g. between the English and biology departments or between the financial aid and parking offices as well as between student groups or individuals. Boundaries also exist between the university and its external environment. For example, a town and its university may share the same geographic location, but boundaries exist between them. Boundary spanners perform a critical function by linking intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational groups to each other and to the university by collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and exchanging information, ideas, resources, and people across these boundaries. In student affairs, much of the boundary spanning is related to students or student-centered concerns. Because so much of the activity of higher education is tied to students who interact across boundaries, student affairs staff must be able to span these boundaries effectively. Successful student affairs work requires constant boundary spanning to stay connected to events, activities, and actions in, across, and outside the institution and to interpret the constantly changing environment both inside and outside the institution. To determine the usefulness of the concept of boundary spanning to student affairs, a study was designed to examine the boundary spanning activities of a sample of senior student affairs officers. The purpose of the study was two-fold: 1) to develop a survey that would adapt the concept of boundary spanning to student affairs, and 2) to determine if senior student affairs officers engage in boundary spanning. The primary research question was to determine if senior student affairs officers engage in boundary spanning activities and if so, to what extent and in what ways. The educational significance of the research was to explore the feasibility of boundary spanning as a model for theory-building and practice in student affairs. Background Bolman and Deal (1991) described four different organizational frames through which leaders or managers view organizations: bureaucratic, human relations, political, and symbolic. The bureaucratic frame is a traditional hierarchy with vertical levels of increasing authority. Human relations values people in an organization while the political acknowledges competition over scarce resources. Symbolic, the last frame, sees actions as theater, a circumstance in which events may not always be what they seem. Bolman and Deal argued that many organizational leaders, including college and university administrators, tend to see organizations through only one or perhaps two of the four frames. …