Educational Reforms and Well-being

Over the past two decades, the higher education sector in Ghana has undergone many reforms
ranging from deregulation and financial sustainability to massive investments in infrastructure. These
reforms are aimed at addressing diversity in schools, promoting inclusive learning and increasing
access to quality tertiary education. The reforms required changes in job skills, job conversions,
modes of teaching and learning, self-consciousness and staff re-locations with probable consequent
effect on the well-being of employees. However, these reforms failed to adequately account for
employee well-being issues. Hence personal changes and support schemes to help employees keep
pace with the changes have received little attention. We investigated these phenomena in public
universities to understand the well-being shifts during the reforms from the storylines of higher
education academic employees.
The study adopted a qualitative research design using laddering interview technique grounded in the
personal change theory to solicit stories from 19 academic employees who have lived across the
reforms. Interpretative Phenomenology Approach (IPA) of data analyses was used to analyse the
experiences of academic employees. The study provides personal stories reflected in real-life
experiences and hinged on the eudemonic theory within a developing country context.
The study discovered that leadership, personal mindset shifts and political interference constitute a
Change-Effect Model that shapes the well-being of academic employees during the period of
organisational reforms. The findings provide a new dimension to organisational reforms and employee
well-being and consider from a critical viewpoint how a change-effect model can be applied in the
change management process to support employee well-being in locally appropriate and effective
ways.