Leadership traditions in China tend to focus on hierarchy, directive leadership approaches and the moral development of individual leaders (Child 1994; Bush and Qiang 2000; Wong 2001). Many contemporary Western leadership theories emphasise on shared vision and distributed leadership, which offer a way to meet the challenges educational leaders are facing in a complex changing context (Gronn 1999; Lakomski 2001; Gronn 2003). Most researches discussing about distributed leadership in Chinese Education, either investigate merely from theoretical perspectives or confine their studies to the school context. This situation left a mystery to discover: Is there a distributed leadership developing in Chinese universities after enormous higher education reforms in recent years? How Chinese university leaders preview Western leadership and relate different perspectives to their own practice? The on-going research, which this paper is based on, enquires into how middle-level leaders of a small sample of Chinese Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are presently interpreting their leadership roles and duties. The objectives of this research are to determine the importance of roles of middle level leaders and their current status within the university, the activities undertaken by leaders and the relative importance of these activities, the ambiguities, conflicts and pressures to which they are subject and to develop a conceptual framework for the role. The research questions are: What does leadership mean according to mid-level leaders at this time? What are the perceived effects of university reforms on their leadership? What challenges do mid-level leaders face in their leadership roles? How are they responding to the changing environment of China’s higher education system? Distributed leadership will be used to explain how middle level leaders, faced with a complex, contradictory and conflicting setting, deal with the situations and challenges they encounter.

A case study approach was adopted in this research. Our study includes 4 universities. Within each university up to 3 faculties were selected. We included a range of disciplines because several studies have noted not only the centrality of disciplines to academic identity, but also their impact on perception of leadership among academics (Kekale 1999; Becher and Trowler 2003; Shattock 2003). As the main method of data collection, we conducted 32 semi-structured interviews comprising 12 deans, 4 associate deans, 3 heads of departments and 13 academics. We promised anonymity to all our interviewees. Document analysis has also been used to corroborate data obtained.

Preliminary findings from the pilot case study of this on-going research, suggest there is a sense among academics that leadership is in some way distributed within the university. The leadership is mostly distributed/shared between the level of university Principals and middle-level leaders i.e. deans of faculties. Below the faculty level, most of heads of departments from the interviews expressed feeling less a distributed leadership, which seems contradictory to their western counterparts. Although middle-level leaders admitted there is a distributed leadership inside the university, they also emphasize on the new shared responsibilities which bring more workload and a more complex working context for them than before. In addition, middle level leaders assert the significant influence from the Chinese Communist Party on their roles and duties.