Scholar’s Online Organizational Engagement and its Consequences for Higher Education Sustainability

Abstract

Currently, there is an increase in online organizational engagement in the academic profession. This paper fits in this context and aims to analyze the scholar's online organizational engagement in higher education sustainability. For that purpose, the authors carried out a collection and documentary analysis of publications on this topic. The results of this conceptual analysis allow concluding that some academics may perceive the requirements for online engagement as excessive. These academics question the confidence they have in their institution and, consequently, the psychological contract itself and the distinction between professional life and personal and family life, which they may perceive as a new form of control and monitoring. However, it is worth highlighting the difference in expectations between academics themselves, caused, among other factors, by the type of contractual experience and by their digital literacy, as well as by their ideological representations about the academic profession and, consequently, in the relative importance of their professional autonomy. In this scenario, the pre-and initial organizational socialization processes are critical in the (re)definition of the psychological contract of scholar's online organizational engagement in the context of higher education sustainability.