Role of Religion in the life of Academic Leadership A Remedy to Stress

Abstract

The present descriptive study aimed to investigate the influence of religion on academic leaders’stress and their coping. Population of the study was consisted of heads, directors and deans of recognized universities located in Lahore, Punjab (Pakistan). The data was collected through purposively sample of 167 academic leaders. Religious Commitment Inventory-10 (RCI-10) and the Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced Inventory (COPE) were used as research instruments. However, the responses were received from 120 out of 167 academic leaders from various universities located in Lahore. The respondents were consisted of both genders where 67 were male and 53 were female. The two more cohorts, based on their age and satisfaction level, were purposively formed. The Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied to measure the differences based on gender, age and satisfaction level. The findings suggest that religion was appeared a significant coping strategy to reduce stress for all academic leaders among others. Further, it was revealed that female academic leaders were more inclined towards their religion than male academic leaders. Intrapersonal religious commitment and interpersonal religious commitment of junior and satisfied academic leaders were found to be higher than senior and dissatisfied ones. It was suggested that future studies should be focused on other variables to investigate the role of religion in the lives of academic leaders like ethnicity, social and economic status, family backgrounds and family.