Navigating Competing Values: Conceptualizing How Managerialism and Shared Leadership Shapes the Decision-Making of Academic Deans

• In Event: Equitable Education Systems and Organizational Leadership

Abstract

Increasingly, academic deans confront the dual pressures of implementing the institutional directives of senior administrators and formulating strategic plans for their units as entrepreneurial chief executives. Former deans stress that senior leadership teams in units assume a critical role in shaping strategic decisions, but few studies explore how deans make decisions with senior teams. In this scholarly paper, we conceptualize how senior leadership teams might shape the decision-making of deans. Specifically, we juxtapose the phenomena of managerialism and shared leadership with a modified version of the competing values framework to explore how academic deans and senior teams make sense of enduring tensions between balancing organizational mission and resource accrual and institutional focus and unit focus.

Authors

• Nathan Frederick Harris, University of Rochester

• Jon McNaughtan, Texas Tech University