Building Commitment for a Campus-Wide Internationalization Initiative – A Case Study of a President’s Creative Challenge at Sheridan College

Abstract

The process of building commitment for a President’s creative challenge with an internationalization theme at Sheridan College, a large community college in Ontario, is analyzed as an exploratory case study in this dissertation. Sheridan College was selected for this study because it is an institution that has a long history of success in leveraging its unique culture (i.e. creative campus) to enable cross-unit collaborations. Kezar’s (2005) stage model of collaboration development was the theoretical framework used to identify the institutional strategies employed by the senior leadership of Sheridan to remove barriers to building commitment for its President’s creative challenge (PCC). This model was also used to identify the essential organizational elements that were instrumental in building commitment for the PCC. Past studies have shown that personal elements are also important for building commitment for collaborative cross-unit endeavours. This study adds to the body of knowledge on collaboration by considering the personal elements that were not addressed in Kezar’s (2005) model of collaboration. Through interviews with administrators, faculty members, and support staff involved in the President’s creative challenge and the analysis of documents dating back to 2010, the institutional, organization, and personal factors for building commitment were illuminated in this study. This case study highlights the features of a strong plan to internationalize a College in Ontario but then explains the barriers that prevented that plan from ever being implemented. This case study highlights the fact that differing cultures and structures between Sheridan College and the universities that Kezar (2005) examined led to differences in the elements that were instrumental in building commitment. This case study also examined the interaction among the elements to explain how the leadership at Sheridan created a sense of urgency for collaboration and encouraged social networking to take place for a PCC with an internationalization theme at Sheridan. This study also revealed that it is the examination of institutional, organizational, and personal considerations for building commitment that are important for future management practice since all of these factors need to be considered to make a transformational change like internationalization happen within a community college.