Shibeshi, Ayalew (Associate Professor)Mekuria, Girma2019-09-172023-11-052019-09-172023-11-052018-06http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/19099The 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 challengesenLeadershipleadership developmentpolicypracticeschallengesThesis