As postsecondary institutions are confronted by the challenges of escalating accountability, shrinking budgets, and administrative downsizing, higher education leaders are expecting more from their faculty members. In this environment, an improved understanding of faculty followership behaviors is increasingly important. We examined the relationship between followership behaviors and individual variables, organizational culture, and institutional variables among Florida community college faculty. Followership behaviors consisted of a total followership score and five dimensional subscores; responsibility, service, challenge, transformation, and moral action. Individual variables included faculty rank, receipt of tenure, age, sex, race, education level, discipline, and duration of employment. Institutional variables included size of the institution, size of the population served, location, and degrees offered.

An on-line questionnaire was completed by 661 faculty members from 27 of Florida’s 28 community colleges. Analyses revealed significant effects for age, education level, and discipline for the responsibility dimension; sex, rank, and discipline for the service dimension; age and discipline for the challenge dimension; tenure, sex, and discipline for the transformation dimension; tenure and age for the moral action dimension; and age, sex, rank, and discipline for the total followership score. Further analyses indicated significant interactions in the responsibility dimension for tenure by duration of employment and academic discipline by duration of employment; and in the service dimension for age by tenure. Significant results for organizational culture were found for each followership dimension except responsibility. Also, statistically significant results were found among institutional variables for the moral action dimension for degree offered, with faculty from colleges that offered bachelor’s degrees scoring higher for moral action than faculty from institutions that did not offer bachelor’s degrees.