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The purpose of this research is to set out to investigate the role of the Pro‐Vice‐Chancellor, Rector, or Principal of a university, and the competencies (attitudes, knowledge and behaviour) that are needed for effective leadership in higher education.

Semi‐structured interviews were held with Pro‐Vice‐Chancellors at ten UK universities representative of the sector.

Most respondents perceived that academic credibility and experience of university life were crucial for effective leadership in higher education, and continued with their research and teaching activities alongside their managerial roles. People skills, including the ability to communicate and negotiate with others, were also felt to be important. Most universities in the study had no systematic approach for either identifying or developing leadership skills.

Although this was a relatively small study, the research highlights the need for a more proactive approach to identifying leadership competencies and developing leadership throughout universities.

The effective leadership and management of universities is a crucial issue for policy makers, leaders themselves, and for university staff. The research shows that university leadership is fundamentally different from leadership in other contexts, and demands additional competencies. It adds to debates about whether leaders in higher education should be academics, or professional business administrators.

Leadership has been recognised as a critical factor for employees' job satisfaction. However, much remains to be learned about how university academics who work in developing country contexts perceive their head of departments (HoDs) and deans' leadership styles and how such leadership styles influence their job satisfaction. Therefore, extending earlier research on higher education leadership, this study was pioneered to examine deans' and heads of departments' leadership styles and how such leadership styles influenced their job satisfaction.

This study employed an exploratory research design to draw on data from in-depth interviews with university academics sourced from two private and two public universities. Participants constituted fifteen academics (N = 15) from the studied universities. The collected data from interviews were transcribed verbatim and subjected to thematic analysis.

The findings revealed that overall, academics perceived their HoDs and deans as employing both transformational and transactional leadership styles. As such, both styles of leadership influenced academics' job satisfaction in diverse ways although the transformational leadership style appeared to be the most dominant in influencing academics' job satisfaction.

The article highlights the need for university managers (i.e. heads of departments and deans) to flexibly employ preferred leadership styles to achieve job satisfaction among academics.

From the theoretical point of view, this article contributes to expanding the earlier research by showing how academics' perceptions of leadership styles employed by their academic leaders shape their job satisfaction.

Senior Indigenous leadership positions across the Australian higher education sector has increased over the past decade. Despite this advancement, there is limited understanding in terms of how to best integrate Indigenous leadership into existing governance structures of Australian universities. In 2018 the Walan Mayiny: Indigenous Leadership in Higher Education project commenced, aimed at establishing a model of best practice for the inclusivity of Indigenous leadership in higher education governance structures. This article presents key findings from the project, namely, a model of senior Indigenous leadership within the Australian universities based on the perceptions of a group of Indigenous academics.

Through qualitative semi-structured interviews with Indigenous academic staff, the perceived value, characteristics and challenges of senior Indigenous leadership were examined. The varying opinions held by Indigenous academics in relation to the qualifications and experience required to fulfil a senior Indigenous leadership position were also highlighted. In doing so, a model of senior Indigenous leadership within the Australian higher education system is presented. The model of best practice presented in this article is underpinned by Indigenous Institutional Theory (Coates et al., 2022), a theoretical framework developed from the Walan Mayiny study.

The research findings highlight the diverse opinions of Indigenous academics in relation to the qualifications and experience required to fulfil a senior Indigenous leadership position. The six essential components are built upon the core characteristics, values and behaviours that senior Indigenous leaders need to have according to Indigenous academics, in order to advance Indigenous success within the academy.

Given Australian universities are being called upon to ensure that senior Indigenous leaders are in the best position possible to forge institutional change, senior Indigenous leaders within the academy may find the contextual Indigenous leadership model beneficial. The model allows one to uphold cultural integrity and fulfil the responsibilities and obligations of their higher education institution, while being able to serve their Indigenous colleagues and communities, leading to the advancement of Indigenous higher education outcomes. Importantly, the model can be adapted to suit all First Nations Peoples globally, who also find themselves working within the shackles of Western institutions.

“New leadership” studies often suggest that transformational leadership in particular produces desirable leadership outcomes. However, few studies have demonstrated a direct link between the exercise of a particular type of leadership and organisational effectiveness. Efforts to establish such a link are hampered by the absence of a generally agreed definition of organisational effectiveness. This is particularly true in higher education where attempts to develop models of organisational effectiveness applicable to universities have been sparse despite worldwide calls for universities to demonstrate “value for money” performance. This paper examines the relationship between transformational/transactional leadership and university organisational effectiveness. In the course of the examination, the paper indicates possible modifications to the original conceptualisation of transformational leadership. The paper also argues for university leadership that is self‐reflective and capable of utilising the array of leadership characteristics subsumed under the transformational and transactional leadership notions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between leadership styles and Organizational commitment among academic staff in Ugandan Public Universities, mediated by Job Satisfaction.

The study was cross-sectional, quantitative, and used correlation and regression to test the hypothesis. A sample of 353 academic staff was drawn from five public universities in Uganda, of which a response rate of 66 percent was obtained.

Organizational commitment among academic staff in public universities in Uganda depends on the age of the academic staff, length of service, position level, leadership styles employed, and job satisfaction. Findings further show that job satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between leadership styles and organizational commitment.

Only a single research methodological approach was employed; thus, future research through interviews could be undertaken to triangulate.

In order to boost the organizational commitment among academic staff in Ugandan Public Universities, managers should always endeavor to employ a blend of leadership styles that leads to job satisfaction and can add value to the employee-employer relationship.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by finding further support on the relationship between leadership styles and organizational commitment among academic staff in Ugandan public universities. It further demonstrates that job satisfaction partially transmits the effect of leadership styles on organizational commitment in public universities in Uganda.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The implementation of sustainability-related policies at universities has been marked by a greater sense of urgency in recent years. Despite this emerging trend, it is still unclear which leadership processes, at which levels and which theoretical concepts encourage sustainable transitions within universities.

This study aims to offer a systematic literature review of the existing literature on sustainability-related leadership processes, levels and theories that encourage the transformation of universities, aimed at providing guidance on this topic; uncovering gaps in the literature; and finding new paths for future research.

Leadership processes in the context of sustainability-related transitions have been approached in a rather fragmented way in the literature, and the scientific field would benefit from more in-depth and longitudinal studies. In total, this study identifies 95 processes that are related to 17 aspects of universities’ transitions.

The various leadership levels are involved in transition processes at different stages. The theories of distributed and sustainability leadership seem to be the most frequently used theories in the literature.

Structuring and defining leadership processes, levels and theories can lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of the transition process and, in a broader sense, of the process of sustainability integration in higher education. A better knowledge of how such a transition develops could contribute to the enhancement of existing sustainable development strategy and policy.

By focusing on an underresearched topic through a theoretical perspective of leadership theories, this study contributes to literature pertaining to leadership levels and processes involved in sustainability transitions of universities.

This paper draws on the extant literature and experiences of selected ACBF‐supported programs to interrogate approaches to enhancing institutional leadership in African universities. The paper posits that African universities must proactively take charge of fostering institutional leadership so as to translate leadership competence into strategic assets. Such assets are key to bolstering intellectual capital, strategic scanning, i.e. the capacity to recognize the behaviour of interconnected systems to make effective decisions under varying strategic and risk scenarios, and the transformation of knowledge. To this end, African universities need to transcend their current “modern” system of education to a post‐modern perspective, which recognizes context, collaboration and knowledge as valued skills. Enhancing institutional leadership is also crucial if Africa is to compete in today’s rapidly globalizing world and knowledge society. More importantly, doing so has direct impact on shaping the quality of leadership on the Continent, and consequently the resulting policy decisions and governance. The paper concludes that while institutional, political, demographic as well as resource challenges exist, African universities today, are uniquely positioned as a result of uptake of knowledge management, strengthened private‐public partnerships and advances in ICT to enhance institutional leadership.

This chapter examines if women in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are constrained in their leadership style and if the organizational culture makes them less valued in senior management teams. It then explores if the 7-S organizational framework has relevance to gender and leadership in HEIs.

The nature of authority within HEIs increases the complexity of leadership within an academic context. Leadership is often vested in a single person, and the positional power of Rectors/Vice-Chancellors (VCs) is based on authority, discipline knowledge, experience, and peer and professional recognition. The literature highlights that HEIs continue to be male dominated and that women are underrepresented in university leadership.

A total of 44 interviews with female and male university senior managers in Australia and Portugal were conducted by the authors and then analyzed using thematic content analysis.

This chapter analyzed the leadership styles of female and male leaders in HEI management teams in Australia and Portugal. It found that both women and men in Australian universities valued transformational leadership skills, whereas the male respondents in Portugal saw traditional management as more effective, even though female respondents considered women demonstrated transformational leadership. It also found that while women’s leadership is recognized in Australian universities, in Portugal men saw women’s leadership as problematic.

The findings suggest that there is more possibility for transformation in the academy if both men and women in HEI leadership value women’s leadership role.