Developing Academic Leaders: Evaluation of a Leadership Development Intervention in Higher Education

Abstract

Leadership development is not considered as a core component in higher education policies specifically when we examine the higher education polices of developing countries. To fill this gap, an intervention is designed to evaluate the impact of a leadership development program in academic leaders. The prime objective of this intervention was to promote awareness among university deans and heads by adopting transformational leadership in their leadership practices. An experimental research design was adopted to map the effects of a 6-week intervention and to evaluate the variations in related six transformational leadership behaviors. Up to 37 academic deans and heads from public universities were involved in this research. Content analysis was carried out to analyze the collected data. Bloom’s taxonomy was adopted as a framework for the analysis. Three lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy were used to identify the awareness indicators. An extensive increase in awareness levels was identified in relation to all six transformational leadership behaviors, and more specifically, a prominent progress was observed at the application level. In addition to implications and limitations, directions for future research were also discussed.

The need for sustainable leadership in academia

“…A crucial step for developing sustainable leadership practices in academia is providing researchers with adequate training opportunities. Some examples for the success of training at universities come from Pakistan or New Zealand where such programs strongly increased leaders’ awareness and self‐confidence (Harris & Leberman, 2012 ; Zulfqar et al , 2021 ). One option would be using leadership skills and training frameworks from other fields.…”

Academic Leadership Development: An Exploratory Study on the Impacts at the Institutional Level Based on an Erasmus+ Capacity Building Project

“…In addition, recent studies have found that distributed leadership and transformational leadership are among the most suitable and common leadership styles currently present in academic institutions (Dinh et al, 2021; Liu, 2019). Thus, academic leadership development focusing on human and social capital enhancement is recommended (Day et al, 2021; Dinh et al, 2021; Zulfqar et al, 2021).…”

The Big Five Factors of Personality Traits and Leadership Practices of Academic Department Chairs: A Predictive Study

“…Mahdinezhad et al (2018) revealed that the effective behaviours of academic leaders relate to effective academic leadership in higher education. Zulfqar et al (2021) discovered that academic leaders' development programmes in�uence their leadership behaviours and practices. Plainly, personality traits and leadership behaviours in�uence academic department chairs' actions and practices to carry out their roles and responsibilities.…”