Leadership Development in Ethiopia’s Public Universities: Policy, Practices, and Challenges
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Date
2018-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The leadership development requires an integrated model to expand leadership competencies
in learning organization; whereas the integrated model of academic leadership development is
less documented in Ethiopia’s public university context. Hence, the main purpose statement of
this study is to understand the academic leadership development policy, practices, and challenges
in Ethiopia’s public universities. The objectives of this study, therefore, is to examine the status
of academic leadership development practices, to investigate leadership behaviors that attribute
to improve leadership outcome, to investigate the leadership development, methodological forms
that envisage useful leadership behaviors, and to examine the challenges that foresee the
development of academic leadership outcome. Further, the focus of the study is to understand
whether the legislative policy standard criteria support the academic leadership development
phases in Ethiopia’s public universities. The researcher employed equal weight, concurrent
mixed method design to guide the research process through the philosophical underpinnings of
pragmatism; a random sampling technique to select six public universities; and stratified random
sampling technique to draw 450 academic leaders from band1, band2, and band6 for the
quantitative inquiry. Further, he employed purposive and snowball sampling techniques to select
18 senior academic officers for qualitative inquiry. The author used modified multifactor
leadership questionnaire, principal instructional management rating scale, and self-developed
challenge and leadership development methodological form items to construct the research
questionnaire. Among 450 questionnaires distributed to academic leaders, 401 (89%) were
properly filled and returned. Besides, partially open-ended interview protocol administered to 18
senior academic officers. Finally, the author employed IBM-SPSS-20 to record, organize, and
analyze the quantitative data. Besides, he manually analyzed the qualitatively gathered data. As
results, the author verified the status of academic leadership development practices is partially
effective (transformational =2.7, transactional = 2.3, laissez-faire = 1.8, and instructional = 2.4
mean scores). Except the instructional leadership (t = 2.6, df = 399, P=0.01), the perceived
transformational (t =1.7, df=399, P=0.09), transaction (t = 0.9, df = 399, P=0.39), and laissezviii
faire (t = 1.9, df = 399, P=0.06) leadership behaviors could not make a significant difference
between faculty members and academic officers. Besides, the stepwise regression results
justified that the combination of transformational, instructional, and laissez-faire leadership
behaviors best explain the development of academic leadership outcome (R2 = 0.63). The
methodological best practices in leadership development are better to explain instructional
leadership behaviors (R2 = 0.39) than to explain full range leadership behaviors (R2 = 0.15).
Challenging the status quo, self-updating, and questioning systematic discriminations account to
improve leadership outcome (R2 = 0.13). In contrast, the role mix conflicts, lack of novelty, lack
of clear goal, lack of commitments, the emerging invisible rules domination over legal rules, and
the growing conflicts of personal interest against the collective interest are the sources of
challenges that require immediate alteration. Transforming the emerging challenges into
developmental challenges are gaining through deriving the expansion processes of setting goals,
aligning the academic task and competencies, and subsuming individual interest in collectives’
interest towards institutional goal. In sum, the legislative policy standard criteria endorsed to
guide the recruiting, selecting, developing, and retaining phases of academic leadership
development partially support the ongoing academic leadership development practices in
Ethiopia’s public university context.
Key Words: Leadership, leadership development, policy, practices, and challenges
Description
Keywords
Leadership, leadership development, policy, practices, challenges