Nurturing academic leadership: A quest for the ideal academic leadership style for Maldives higher education

Abstract

Higher education leadership is an understudied area, especially at the departmental or faculty level. The current study explored preferred academic leadership styles as perceived by academic deans and their lecturers in Maldivian Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). A sequential explanatory mixed method design informed by post-positivist techniques was used in this study. In the first phase, the survey method was used to directly reach many respondents, administer the instruments and to collect the required data. from deans (N=20) and lecturers (N=170) from nine different HEIs. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) version 23 was used to analyze the data using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics such as means, percentages, standard deviations, independent sample t-test and Pearson correlation coefficients. In the second phase, a qualitative approach was used to explain, validate and to triangulate the quantitative findings. This phase used semi-structured interviews for purposively selected deans (N=5) and lecturers (N=16) from seven different HEIs. The interview transcripts were thematically analyzed and coded using the template analysis method. The most preferred academic leadership styles in Maldivian HEIs were found to be transformational, distributed, and transactional leadership styles, respectively. To enhance academic leadership in HEIs in the Maldives, this study recommends academic leaders to use transformative and distributive leadership behaviors, which would also help HEIs in the skill development of academic deans.

Perception gap: Academic leadership styles in Maldivian higher education institutes

“…The laissez-faire leadership style being the least popular could be because of the passive leadership role and by the leader being passive, this affects the productivity of the whole organization. Laissez-faire leaders strive to put off reacting to pressing situations that require their attention and show less involvement in organizational affairs [52,53] . Further, the leader does not make any attempt to satisfy the colleagues or subordinates.…”

“…Such leaders are less concerned with people and the organization, have damaging effects on the productivity and leave the organization voluntarily or are terminated [51] . Further, Laissez-faire leaders participate less in organization work and delay responding to critical issues that need their attention [52,53] . According to Avolio [54] , on the leadership behavior continuum, the laissez-faire leadership is at the lowest.…”

A Case Study on the Role of Heads of Departments in Improving Teachers’ Professional Development

“…They perform different roles; transformational leadership role; instructional leadership role; distributive leadership role; technology leadership role; contingent leadership role; ethical leadership role etc. for the enhancement of TPD (Sarwar et al, 2022;Waheeda, 2022;Zhuo, 2022). In Pakistan, there is little research work on HODs' leadership role toward TPD in higher education.…”