Academic leadership: agility in the digital revolution

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought tremendous challenges for the educational field, especially in terms of leadership strategies to be taken on a short notice in order to ensure both health security of the personnel and learners, but also adapt to an online teaching environment and other challenges. While several higher education institutions had partially or completely adapted to an online educational model, the COVID-19 period offered new challenges in terms of internationalization, investment in technology and financing, but also in terms of implementing new educational models, fully online or hybrid models. Based on a sample of 23 Universities from the European Union, the current research aimed to propose new directions of the academic leadership strategies and focus points during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as expected trends after the end of the pandemic. Based on the study of the academic leadership strategies and models in the European Union, this paper offers an additional practical overview to existing studies in the field, as it inquires the implemented university leadership strategies in order to adapt and overcome the current pandemic crisis, as well as ensuring the continuity of activities and development of higher educational institutions.

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“…Many authors believe that digital leadership is an under-researched practice in higher education (Cifuentes-Álvarez, Vanderlinde, 2015; Masrur, 2021). One of the definitions of digital leadership was developed by Ebler & Drews (2021, p. 226): digital leadership is a complex construct aiming for a customer-centred, digitally enabled, leading-edge business model by ( 1 The period of the Covid-19 pandemic encouraged researchers to explore the subject of digital transformation in HEIs and the issue of agility as a characteristic of an HEI that adapts better to operating in a turbulent environment (Dima et al, 2021;Memon, Suresh, 2020 however, there is still little exploration of this topic.…”