Social and Environmental Pressures in Management Education: How Anticipatory Stress and Social Support Interact to Predict Students’ Academic Engagement and Performance

Abstract

The chapter reports on antecedents and outcomes of first-year management students’ educational engagement. Specifically, the research focused on the role of (1) anticipatory stress (i.e., stress experienced by students prior to the start of term), (2) early social support for students by instructors (at the first week of the academic year), and (3) the effects of early socialization activities (organized by the university to improve student integration) on students’ academic engagement during their first term. Drawing on comparisons with workplace commitment (Solinger et al., Organization Science, 24(6): 1640–1661, 2013), the report describes different developmental paths of academic engagement: (1) increasing academic engagement over time (‘learning to love’), (2) decreasing academic engagement over time (‘honeymoon hangover’), and (3) high, moderate, or low stable academic engagement. These different paths or trajectories were found to correspond to differences in students’ grade point averages (GPAs) at the end of the first term.