Leadership Development

This week I was fortunate to meet with one of our new Faculty Fellows, Dr. Emily Roxworthy, Provost of Warren College, whose Fellows project focuses on Leadership in Higher Ed. So, I thought sharing a 2012 paper on the topic by Professor Robin Middlehurst form Kingston University, UK entitled "Leadership and Management in Higher Education: A Research Perspective" would be useful.

The paper provides an overview of research on higher edu leadership. The goals were to identify main research paradigms and issues; second, identify key insights from research; third, highlight specific research that have informed leadership; and finally, suggest future research.

The paper finds that “There is [still] no widely accepted definition of leadership, no common consensus on how best to develop leaders, and remarkably little evidence of the impact of leadership development on performance and productivity”. Historically, the focus was on a positivist paradigm using attributes such as Characteristics of people; Results; Formal leadership positions; and How leaders get things done. More recently, the focus has shifted to a social constructivist framework involving more disciplines.

Further work suggested includes looking at the impact of leadership on the core functions of universities that are changing, such as teaching and learning; cross-cultural leadership; interaction of leadership and governance; and an intense need to understand success and failure in leadership.