Organisational Culture(s) and SoTL Leadership

Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between organisational culture(s) and leadership in relation to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in higher education. It addresses the persistent challenge of embedding SoTL beyond individual engagement and situates SoTL as a cultural and institutional endeavour rather than a standalone practice. Drawing on theories of institutional culture, microcultures, and organisational change, the chapter explores how norms, values, and practices surrounding teaching and learning are formed, sustained, and reshaped at multiple organisational levels. Particular attention is given to disciplinary and departmental microcultures, local teaching and learning regimes, and the role of frontstage and backstage conversations in mediating change. The chapter conceptualises SoTL as both a developmental and a leadership-oriented activity, highlighting the importance of formal, informal, and distributed leadership in supporting cultural organisational change. The chapter provides conceptual tools and practical insights for those seeking to foster institutional cultures in which SoTL is valued and sustained.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has emerged as a powerful movement within higher education. It seeks, among other things, to attend to teaching by embedding inquiry, reflection, and dissemination into everyday educational practice. In a recent report from the European University Association (2025), it is concluded that SoTL is not just an individual practice but a cultural and institutional endeavour that enhances teaching quality, fosters professional development, and strengthens accountability. However, stimulating SoTL within higher education requires a shift in how institutions, leaders, and individuals conceptualise teaching and learning – aspects that this text aims to shed light on.

While SoTL has gained wide recognition, its institutional embedding remains a challenge (Collins et al., 2025; Fanghanel et al., 2016). Likewise, national, economical, and political contexts may influence different SoTL initiatives – as shown by Chng et al. (2020) with examples from Asia, South Africa, and Europe. For SoTL to thrive, it must not only be practiced by committed individuals but also supported, legitimized, and sustained by the cultures and formal structures of the academic contexts in which it unfolds. Leadership, therefore, among other things becomes crucial—not only in the sense of formal authority but also through informal and distributed forms of leadership that can influence cultural features at multiple institutional levels.

This chapter explores institutional cultures and SoTL leadership, mainly from a theoretical perspective. It situates SoTL within institutional and micro-cultural contexts, and theorizes how culture changes, as well as how SoTL specifically has the potential to contribute to cultural change. Understanding culture is the cornerstone of effective SoTL leadership. The theories presented here provide SoTL leaders with lenses for understanding local cultures, designing interventions, and fostering sustained change. Along with Kezar & Eckel (2002), we argue that a deep understanding of an institution’s unique cultural norms is crucial for successful comprehensive change. The chapter therefore also outlines strategies to support SoTL as a vehicle to influence institutional culture; including practical implications for how leaders—formal and informal—can stimulate SoTL. The aim is to provide both conceptual inspiration and actionable guidance for those seeking to cultivate institutional cultures where SoTL can grow.

SoTL in an institutional culture

As stated initially, we argue that stimulating SoTL within higher education requires a shift in how institutions, leaders, and individuals conceptualise teaching and learning. Or, in other words, the more SoTL can become an embedded feature of an institutional culture, the more norms will shift. Too often, teaching has been treated as a private, isolated activity, while research is seen as collective, shared, and publicly accountable (Handal, 1999). SoTL bridges this suggested dichotomy by defining that teaching, like research, should be subjected to systematic inquiry, peer review, and some form of dissemination (what is most often in the SoTL literature called ‘going public’; Boyer, 1990). For this shift to take root in institutional cultures, conditions need to be created, and norms be established, where scholarly teaching is not an exceptional practice but a cultural expectation. This is arguably a slow, incremental process, requiring a multitude of activities and approaches at all organisational levels. As an example, Kluijtmans (Case Study: Institutional Cultures and SoTL Leadership in this book) in her practical leadership narrative from Utrecht University, provides details on how the university introduced several complementary initiatives. She summarises that in that context they were “focusing on both competency development, support, grants, visibility, and recognition […] laying a strong foundation for a culture that values education”.

To think institutionally about SoTL, several perspectives are helpful:

SoTL as culture, not just practice

SoTL involves not only what teachers do but also the shared meanings, values, and norms around teaching (Mårtensson, 2014; Roxå & Mårtensson, 2015; Trowler, 2020). SoTL encourages a view on teaching similar to that of research (Boyer, 1990), where observations of teaching and subsequent decisions about development of teaching for the benefit of student learning is communicated frontstage (Goffman, 2000) in academic local and organisational contexts. This implies that SoTL has the potential to influence the norms and values of an academic culture, to treat teaching and learning as a scholarly endeavor.

SoTL as developmental

Engagement with SoTL provides opportunities to better understand one’s own teaching and the students’ learning in that context, with the main purpose to improve and develop it (Larsson et al., 2020) as well as to contribute to knowledge about teaching and learning, in support of the broader aims of higher education (Chick et al., 2025). In other words, SoTL has a strong feature of being developmentally oriented.

SoTL as leadership

Institutional leaders, formal and informal, play a pivotal role in shaping cultures where SoTL is recognised, resourced, and connected to long-term educational quality (EUA, 2025; Kluijtmans, 2026). Stimulating SoTL institutionally therefore requires leadership at multiple levels: senior leaders must signal its importance; mid-level leaders must create supportive structures; and informal leaders must champion SoTL-engagement in conversations and networks (Kenny et al., 2016; Verwoord & Poole, 2016). Thus, thinking about SoTL institutionally means seeing it as a lever for cultural development, not merely as a set of projects or individual scholarly outputs. In the following, we will introduce some perspectives that can help SoTL leaders to understand and potentially change institutional cultures.

Institutional culture at the organisational meso-level

At an overarching level, a university may be characterised by being mainly research-intensive or teaching-oriented, or something else, and to have different general “organisational ideals” (Stensaker, 2006). In this text, we argue that academic institutions do not have “one culture” but many. Culture is created through regular interactions, and it defines and differentiates a group as compared to others (Alvesson, 2002). A description of a teaching culture says something about how a group of for example academic teachers talk, interact, and act in relation to teaching – their ways of thinking and practicing (Hounsell & Anderson, 2009). Some parts of the culture can be observed, other parts are patterns of thinking, and the most central and fundamental part, the ethos (Kezar, 2007) of the culture – underlying assumptions linked to the very existence of the culture (Schein, 1985). In all, culture is a collective feature that saves cognitive energy for its members. The sense of “this is how we do things here”, provides members with guidance, identity, and stability, offering them cognitive space to focus on what appears important for the group. These traits have been shaped over time, is part of the group’s history, and is what members are socialised into at the same time as each member continues to shape and recreate the culture. In ideal cases a culture can be perfectly adapted to tasks at hand, while in others it can be dysfunctional (Ostrom, 1990).

Yet, from a cultural perspective the ecosystem of a knowledge-intensive organisation, such as a university, consists of a number of “semi-autonomous knowledge networks” (Hannah & Lester, 2009), all shaping their own cultures – their own unique ways of knowing and practising, gradually shaping that “way we do things around here”. In relation specifically to teaching and learning in higher education, Trowler (2008) provides a crucial lens by describing such group-cultures as local teaching and learning regimes – where norms, values, habits, and taken-for-granted practices regarding teaching, student learning, and assessment develop over time. Trowler argues that rather than focusing solely on institutional cultures at the university-wide level, it is more fruitful to consider the disciplinary, departmental, or subject-specific communities where most academics anchor their professional identities as the main loci of potential change.

This perspective has been further developed by Roxå & Mårtensson (2011, 2014, 2015), exploring microcultures in higher education, where disciplinary epistemologies, traditions of practice, and everyday norms shape attitudes toward teaching and learning. This research explores how teaching cultures are sustained, generated or changed. Change initiatives introduced from the top of the organisation are always filtered through the meanings and practices of the local microcultures (Mårtensson et al., 2014). Strong microcultures, in their study, were characterised by a shared responsibility, high levels of trust, and a developmental agenda. Within such microcultures, the norms will mediate how SoTL is interpreted and valued. SoTL initiatives may be embraced enthusiastically, while in other kinds of microcultures, where perhaps trust or a shared responsibility is lacking, SoTL can be resisted as a distraction, or simply ignored. Recognising this diversity is essential for SoTL leadership: strategies that work in one microculture may fail in another. We will return to this matter later.

Thus, a cultural perspective on SoTL must attend to these local contexts, treating departments, disciplines, educational programmes, and teaching teams not as neutral recipients of institutional policies and initiatives but as a plethora of active cultural sites where the relevance and meaning of SoTL is negotiated. Change ambitions must therefore include a firm understanding of how these microcultures are continuously reconstructed and how practices propagate from one microculture to another and further across the targeted organization.

Changing institutional culture through change in microcultures

Kezar (2018) suggests, from a meta-perspective on organisational change, that change in higher education organisations can be described through five approaches: Scientific management (top-down, led by informed leaders), Evolutionary (outside-in, external forces), Political (internal stakeholders, through debate, alliances and power influence), Social cognition (informed decisions, practitioners learn how to support student learning), Cultural or Neo-institutional [see Endnote 1] (reconfiguration of norms). As argued in another chapter in this book by Kluijtmans (2026) and in line with Kezar’s conclusions, we also suggest that all these approaches should be considered and applied as means for change. Due to limited space, though, we will focus on cultural change and how SoTL can be used to influence microcultures.

Microcultures may appear stable over time but at closer look they are in a constant dynamic state of evolution where members collaborate in reconstructing the culture on a day-to-day basis. Vollmer (2013) demonstrates that key features in this reconstruction include a) the relationship between members (e.g. status and hierarchy); b) the value assigned to various cognitive material (knowledge); and c) the way members behave towards each other and the outside world (norms). Vollmer’s interest concerns how stability is upheld collaboratively by members. The mechanisms he identifies may however be used in attempts to influence microcultures. In short, change in a microculture is linked to one or all of the three aspects: Who decides (status and hierarchy) What is relevant (cognition and knowledge) and How this is communicated (norms)? Change efforts can thereby intentionally consider which of these aspects should be the entry point for change and help negotiate processes that in the end are likely to influence all three aspects. For example, change through project funding may support individuals in a microculture to develop new ways to teach. This will temporarily support the recipient of funding and potentially shift hierarchies in the group. If norms and/or cognitive priorities in the microculture remains the same, practices run the risk of returning to normal as the funding ends, a frequent outcome (Kottman et al., 2024; Lane et al., 2020). For change to become sustainable, it may start in one of the three aspects but needs to also proceed to influence the others.

SoTL as a way to influence microcultures

In academic organisations and perhaps especially in research intensive contexts, SoTL can be argued to align with the ethos of academic culture, i.e. the scholarliness. However, what it does not automatically do is to influence culture. It can very well remain an individual enterprise where the individual seeks out other venues than the local workplace to share SoTL-experiences (described as trajectory 1 in Roxå et al. (2008), see later in this text for a more detailed account). Attention therefore should be directed to how to increase frequency and quality in scholarly conversations locally (trajectory 2). A key to achieve this is to focus on SoTL as production of local knowledge (Ashwin & Trigwell, 2004), anchored in the specific organisation at hand.

A feature we have not yet touched upon is microcultures’ frontstage (Goffman, 2000) characteristics. Culture is reconstructed daily through interactions and negotiations (Alvesson, 2002; Vollmer, 2013). Cultural change therefore would imply, as indicated by Vollmer’s (2013) perspective above, change in how members interact, what cognitive material they use in these interactions and the internal distribution of status among members. But there is also a backstage aspect (Goffman, 2000) of this. In parallel to collegial conversations frontstage, individual academics also have sincere conversations privately about teaching and learning with a few selected, trusted colleagues, so called significant networks (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2009). In these networks academic teachers discuss teaching and students in sometimes different ways than while participating in the daily frontstage interactions with colleagues sharing a microculture. Attempts to influence microcultures should therefore also include a perspective on and awareness of these significant networks, since ideas and innovations as well as resistance to change often move through these more hidden channels (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2012).

SoTL offers a mechanism through which backstage conversations can be drawn upon and used in change efforts. It allows or even requires backstage conversations to move frontstage and thereby actively influences how microcultures evolve. Engaging in SoTL entails going public with observations, reflections, and conclusions about teaching and student learning. If this is to be useful in change efforts, a key issue concerns how to engage more academics in this; how to increase the number of backstage conversations to move into the frontstage domain. An ample example on how to do this is provided by Førland et al. (in press). They argue that providing a multitude of entry points for teachers into scholarly conversations and to offer this over a long time can result in a measurably larger proportion of academics to engage. An easy entry point might be to engage in a web-based seminar, a more advanced is to present a SoTL-inquiry at a local campus conference, at an international conference or even publish in relevant peer reviewed journals. The authors provide empirical evidence of increased engagement over a period of ten years, both in terms of the number of academics engaging as well as an increased sophistication in how to engage.

In short, we argue that by creating and offering structures and venues where backstage conversations can be out in the open in ways suitable for the local contexts and to do this over time will influence individual microcultures especially concerning how teaching and learning is talked about. This way, change starts in the normative aspect (Vollmer, 2013) because going public locally requires attention to how observations are made, how these are interpreted and how findings are reported. This change will then influence the what- and the who-aspects.

To understand how SoTL then exerts influence beyond the borders of a microculture, we need to consider a system of microcultures. Centola (2018) offers such a perspective through social network analysis and through experiments on social media. He shows that systems change, not through being targeted by strong policies or an intensified general flow of information but instead through the mechanism where members of different microcultures (or clusters using a network terminology) encounter each other. Information is shared from person to person and moved from the periphery of a microculture into its center, thereby contributing to change. As argued by Centola, influence depends on interaction with some degree of intricacy leading to complex influence. If the process is repeated in many places and over time, new practices may spread in the system. Influencing cultures therefore becomes a matter of perseverance. The process will take time. New ideas must be formulated, and new practices be described and renegotiated to suit various microcultures. SoTL, with a focus on creation of local knowledge, integration, and going public provides an opportunity for academic teachers to incorporate teaching innovations through micro-cultural renegotiations. The process may be further scaffolded if the SoTL-reports, the tangible artefacts of SoTL, are curated locally and continuously referred to as an asset by change leaders (Brown et al., accepted).

In short, we conclude that individual microcultures and wider cultures in higher education organisations develop through the power of more and better conversations about teaching and learning. SoTL provides a strategy for achieving this.

Following from the above, as a widespread initiative to positively influence existing teaching and learning cultures, SoTL encourages a more elaborated practice for observation of teaching, decisions about teaching, and last but not least, how teaching is talked about. New material related to teaching and learning gathered in more advanced ways are fed into an ongoing, supported organisational conversation where gradually more people take part. In relation to Vollmer’s (2013) perspective, it involves a normative shift, where new voices are heard and new information is considered. Consequently, former hierarchies will be dislocated. SoTL thereby also becomes a political enterprise in respective organization that embarks on such a journey – something that SoTL leaders need to be aware of and take into consideration.

Strategies for supporting SoTL and cultural change

One question then becomes: what could, and should institutions and leaders do to cultivate SoTL cultures? First, and following from the above, it is crucial to recognise and acknowledge that cultural change requires sustained engagement, reinforcement, and visible recognition. Returning to Kluijtman’s leadership example from Utrecht University, she also stresses the importance to “address institutional culture by facilitating competency development, providing support opportunities, valuing SoTL, and modeling evidence-informed leadership practices.”

As already indicated, SoTL has been shown to be not only a scholarly activity but also a powerful mechanism for cultural change (Førland et al., in press; Mårtensson, 2014). Mårtensson et al. (2011) showcase that SoTL has the capacity to influence how teaching is locally valued, discussed, and improved within academic communities and institutional cultures if and when a multitude of various activities in the organisation are linked.

It may be important – institutionally – to stress the focus on the local level going public, which can also be perceived as a difference between SoTL and regular research expectations. Roxå et al (2008) differentiate between two trajectories of SoTL engagement: Trajectory 1 where an individual academic undertakes a SoTL project and attends a teaching & learning conference (outside of their institution), but without support or follow-up, the impact remains personal and limited. Colleagues in their own context may not even know of this project or the learning opportunities it has provided. The local culture therefore does not change because the engagement does not ripple outward. Trajectory 2 on the other hand is a more networked SoTL participation where individuals engage in SoTL and primarily bring their learning back into their local microcultures. They share findings, initiate discussions, and contribute to collective reflection in the local, institutional context (Ashwin & Trigwell, 2004). Over time, this networked engagement begins to shift cultural norms. Obviously the two trajectories can be combined, one doesn’t have to exclude the other – but for the institutional culture to change then it is insufficient only to encourage and reward SoTL-trajectory 1.

Furthermore, for SoTL to significantly contribute to cultural change, Mårtensson (2014) argues there must be arenas for dialogue, reflection, and sharing within the local context. This can be departmental meetings, teaching seminars, reading groups, campus conferences or informal networks – all of which can be initiated and supported by leaders. Additionally, and previously indicated artifacts such as teaching portfolios, blogs, online repositories, presentations or SoTL papers make teaching practices and inquiry results visible and serve as boundary objects that fuel conversations. We therefore argue, along with Schein (1985) that culture can change when new artifacts (in this case such as teaching portfolios, departmental seminar presentations, or SoTL publications) and routines (such as peer discussion of teaching) become embedded in daily life. Consequently, supporting the production, collection, curation, and sharing of artefacts within an institution may then contribute to enhance the value of teaching and changing teaching culture (Brown et al., accepted) – another activity that SoTL leaders can initiate and support at various levels.

Because cultural change is slow and incremental, the effects of SoTL engagement on the institutional culture will evidently take time (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2012). Hence, SoTL leaders must cultivate patience and persistence, recognising that results may only become visible over years or even decades. As indicated previously, Roxå & Mårtensson (2009) highlight the importance of significant conversations and informal networks in fostering cultural change: When academics engage in trustful, meaningful discussions about teaching with selected peers, their perspectives shift, and new practices take root. Following this, cultural change occurs when networks of colleagues begin to normalize new practices (Roxå et al., 2010). The authors argue that a single, isolated attempt to change culture is likely to fail, and rather “a multitude of inter-related initiatives over a long period of time is likely to distinguish strategies that are successful in influencing academic teaching and learning cultures” (99). Therefore, leaders – in whichever organisational role they act, formal or informal, and at various institutional levels – need to create conditions for such significant conversations. This can be done by legitimizing them, by providing time and space (arenas), by recognising their value and by making sure that a multitude of inter-related initiatives support the institutional value of engaging in SoTL. Cultural change may be slow, but it is possible. Through sustained, trust-based conversations and visible SoTL engagement, leaders at all levels can gradually reorient the academic culture toward valuing teaching as a scholarly act.

Endnote

[1] Kezar separates Cultural and Neo-institutional but in our view they are very similar and we therefore in this context treat them as one.

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