Making contributions as a new department chair is first dependent upon a chairs' sense of role certainty. What is interesting is that after two decades of conference presentations, journal articles, and books on the department chair role we still have few data-based studies for understanding how individuals perceive themselves and their professional challenges in the post of department chair (Gmelch, 1991). The present research suggests a way of understanding how new chairs might see the barriers to understanding their role more clearly than current theory and research has offered. The combination of a role's characteristics (role confidence), a newcomer's individual characteristics (personality needs), and the role's context (role support) are predicted to explain the degrees of difference among and between new department chairs' sense of role certainty. A survey was used to collect data from individuals who were first-time department chairs and had been in the job between 0 and 3 years. Standard multiple regression was used to help explain how well role confidence, personality needs, and role support were able as a group to explain the variance of role certainty among new department chairs. Separate tests were run to discern the relative contribution of each scale on role certainty. The data from the present study show that making contributions as a chair is bound up in finding (Ashford & Cummings, 1983, 1985; Miller & Jablin, 1991) and making sense (Gioia & Thomas, 1996) of the contextual knowledge (Dutton, Ashford, O'Neill, & Lawrence, 2001) surrounding the role of department chair. New chairs who fail to realize the knowledge that one "lives" as a subordinate, an equal, and as a superior (Clegg & McAuley, 2005; Uyterhoeven, 1972) will miss leveraging change for the department (Huy, 2001) resulting in a lack of upward influence for the benefits of the colleagues they represent (Falbe & Yukl, 1992). Based upon the findings of this study institutions ought to look strongly at the role of the dean, the personal attributes and career aspirations of chair candidates, and current organizational development offices and programs in providing support to newcomer department chairs. Additional recommendations include a consideration of how the more general literature on middle management research might be a benefit to higher education, and in particular how institutions may integrate the idea that management is a multifaceted phenomenon and not limited to specific disciplines, industries, or a small group of individuals.
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