Framing Global Diversity Leadership

• In Event: Governance and Leadership in Higher Education: Research on Engagement, Autonomy, and Diversity

Proposal

Relevance

In a global higher education landscape rife with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), effective senior leadership is pivotal to carry out institutional missions and goals (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014). With these missions and goals emphasizing diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIJB) in conjunction with internationalization, it is necessary to examine the utility of DEIJB leadership frameworks in a global context. Mironko et al. (2021) argued that “global research needs to expand to look not just at gaps in leadership but new contexts for it”, relating higher education’s evolving connectivity to leadership capacity (p. 549). Our research team, which included the study’s original designer and two graduate students, sought to analyze three potentially relevant conceptual frameworks of leadership to contribute to this better understanding, asking the extent to which senior leaders’ characteristics and reported actions overlap with the behaviors of the three leadership frameworks as well as to evaluate the utility of applying these frameworks as analytic tools in international higher education (IHE).

We applied secondary analyses to a recent study (Author, 2023) of global liberal arts campus senior leaders’ perspectives on their institutions’ approaches to religious worldview diversity education (WDE). Selected frameworks for analysis included conceptualizations of global leadership (Mendenhall et al., 2018) and diversity change leadership (Williams, 2013), as well as an interfaith champion typology (Staples et al., 2022) relevant to the study’s worldview dimension of diversity. We compared how the reported and observed behavior of senior global leaders aligned with the behaviors described in the frameworks to evaluate their utility for application to IHE. By exploring how global and DEIJB leadership overlap in international contexts, this research furthers understanding to develop globally effective DEIJB leaders.

Theory/Context

Higher education internationalization explores collapsing physical boundaries which have brought people from diverse backgrounds and cultures together (Mironko et al., 2021). With this increased interconnectedness, DEIJB leadership is even more relevant in the emerging IHE landscape. Global leadership can be understood as “being capable of operating effectively in a global environment while being respectful of cultural diversity” (Harris et al., 2004, p. 25). To work towards developing effective global leaders as IHE operates in a VUCA world, relevant frameworks such as the three analyzed in this study will be needed.

Efforts have been made in the past decade to meta-analyze and streamline the existing global leadership research (Mendenhall et al., 2018) and begin to apply it to international education (Gurr, 2024; Liu et al., 2020). Global leadership is both pivotal for effecting transformative change within institutions and developmental: global leadership can be learned.

Diversity leadership is a concept related to both change leadership and diversity, but about which there is more higher education-focused research (Adserias et al., 2017; Aguirre & Martinez, 2006; Brown et al., 2019; Kezar & Eckel, 2008). Interfaith leadership, as a subset of diversity leadership, exists in practice and a suggested typology of champions has been offered (Staples et al., 2022) to describe the variation in how this form of leadership can look and function. Recently, international education administrators have begun to join internationalization and DEIJB conceptually and in practice (ACE DEI/IZN Intersections Subcommittee, n.d.; Ahmed et al., 2021; Cunningham & Sanchez, 2023), echoing what scholars (Edwards & Kitamura, 2019; Özturgut, 2017) have been calling for: diversity change leadership that is global in scope and inclusive of worldviews.

Mode of Inquiry

An initial broad survey was conducted in the spring of 2023 provided context into global liberal arts colleges and universities senior leaders engaging in WDE. One of the authors conducted elite interviews (Dexter, 2006) with nine representative cabinet level leaders. The semi structured interview protocol included questions mapped to the leadership concepts that are the focus of this analysis. Senior leaders were asked their rationale, role and actions relating to worldview diversity engagement and the influential networks for their campuses and for themselves as leaders. A member check opportunity was extended after transcription and initial rounds of thematic coding to check for credibility (Schwandt, 2015) between leaders’ perspectives and the researcher's representation to enhance trustworthiness.

For this secondary analysis, authors generated a crosswalk comparing the characteristics and behaviors across the three frameworks. Subsequently, we deductively re-coded the interview data using the three frameworks. The research team agreed on terminology, divided transcripts for coding and spot checked each other’s coding to establish inter-coder reliability.

Findings

Analyses revealed that shared characteristics were evident between the three chosen frameworks. When combined, they offer a profile describing successful leaders who promote a compelling vision, consult with and coordinate between multiple perspectives and constituents, engage in boundary-spanning behaviors, and provide both narrative and structure for transformational change. This observed convergence may indicate that these are the key skillsets IHE leaders require and underscores the importance of analyzing the frameworks’ applicability to leadership in diverse contexts.

While all three frameworks were useful in understanding diversity leadership in the context of IHE, the strategic diversity leadership framework and global leadership competencies were the most robust in terms of reported and observed behaviors that drive change. The interfaith champion typology was relevant due to leaders’ emphasis on student worldview development but was the least behaviorally-focused.

Contribution

A gap exists in scholarship when it comes to applying global and diversity leadership frameworks to IHE leadership practice, and yet there is an apparent overlap in the knowledge, skills, and abilities these multiple ways of framing leadership espouse. Scholars have called for equity-minded higher education leadership (George Mwangi & Yao, 2020), the internationalization of DEIJB (Özturgut, 2017; Williams, 2013), and for WDE (Edwards & Kitamura, 2019), each of which intersect with global and diversity leadership in IHE settings. This study addresses this confluence by analyzing senior leadership of one dimension of diversity according to three potentially relevant leadership frameworks, assessing the frameworks’ applicability and utility for IHE leadership.

Authors

• Renee L Bowling, The Ohio State University

• Nicholas Martin Rodgers, The Ohio State University-Columbus - Columbus, OH

• Hannah Lewis, The Ohio State University-Columbus - Columbus, OH