Leadership Crisis in Academia: Exploration and Measurement of Effective Academic Leadership

Abstract

cademic leadership is essential for quality education and the growth of academic institutions. Ineffective academic leaders create leadership crisis. The purpose of this research project was to explore leadership crisis in academia and solution to this crisis, and to construct and validate an effective academic leadership scale in the context of Pakistan. A mixed method design that comprised four independent studies was used to meet the objectives. In study 1, the crisis situation in academia of Pakistan was explored. Focus group technique and semi structured interviews were used with a purposive sample of faculty members, students and academic leaders from randomly chosen higher education institutions to explore the reasons and solutions to academic leadership crisis. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. Results indicated reasons and solutions to academic leadership crisis, collectively described by three groups of participants (viz., faculty members, students, and academic leaders). All three groups agreed that main reasons of academic leadership crisis were the ineffective leadership along with issues in educational institutions, decline of ethical and moral values, and unjustified methods of leader selection. The participants suggested that we need to replace current academic leaders with effective leaders to bring change in the institutions. Study 2 was designed to explore the charcteristics of effective academic leadership and to compare these charcteristics with the characteristics of corporate leadership. A purposive sample of 200 particpants: students, teachers and corporate sector employees provided the sources of data for the qualities which they deemed essential in effective academic and corporate leaders. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis were used to analyze the data. Communication skills, assertiveness, creativity, integrity/honesty, confidence, motivation and humbleness were the similar attributes in both effective academic and corporate leaders. As 12 differences concern, people expected an effective academic leader to have intellectual ability, cooperative skill, flexibility, knowledge, understanding and respectful attitude, which provideed a softer image of academic leader. Whereas, a corporate leader was expected to be visionary, disciplined, and passionate In study 3 qualities of effective academic leaders were used to develop a tool/ measure of effective academic leadership. A pool of 26 items was generated for measuring effectiveness of academic leaders through scale construction. A purposive sample of 100 academic leaders of public and private sector universities from different cities of Pakistan was selected. After using exploratory factor analysis, a uni dimensional solution was found which accounted for 52.83% variance. Cronbach‘s alpha yielded a value of .97. Construct validity of the final 19-items scale was established via using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) through AMOS 21.0. Convergent validity of scale was established by correlating scores on Effective Academic Leadership Scale with the scores on Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Bass & Avolio, 1992). Results revealed significant positive correlation between the two scales (r =.32. p <.01). Study 4 was conducted to assess the relationship and predictive strength of effective academic leadership in job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Job satisfaction appeared to be significantly positively related to EALS whereas organizational commitment remained non significant with EALS. Limitations, future suggestions and implications of all the studies have also been discussed.