Provisional selves, revolving teams & temporary workspaces

When you look at the division of staff responsibilities among student affairs units at most midsize to large institutions, you will see that many professionals have adopted a specialist persona. This is a common outcome found with the organizational structures used within student affairs. The overlap of roles and responsibilities does not occur, leading to silos. Silos perpetuate isolation, discourage collaboration, and make advancement difficult for professionals. To help our field combat this problem, we need to structure our units to develop professionals into generalists. Blending concepts developed by Ancona & Bresman (2007) and Petriglieri, Petriglieri & Wood (2017), this paper proposes a new workplace model for student affairs professionals that encourages the formation of provisional selves, revolving teams and temporary workspaces.