CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 

Education is one of the most important building blocks of the nations as it helps societies to overcome inequalities through the existence of a well-thought system. Key moral purpose of education is to have a domino effect to improve human condition by developing people’s knowledge in the institution’s immediate society and thereby contribute to a wider scale (Bush & Middlewood, 2005). While improving students’ condition through knowledge expansion, educators’ improvement should also be considered if quality and equality in education is targeted. As these concerns are still raised in the 21^st century, there is no doubt that much more effort should be put forth to accept individual differences and to offer equal opportunities for all. Leaders should also be relating their purposes to this end, caring for the developmental needs of the instructors, recognizing the differences among them to help build a promising long-term perspective, especially for the novice researchers.

The qualities and behaviors expected of a leader can only be realistic if the educational administration becomes a profession in a country. However, it is known that in most educational institutions, some of the ones in Turkey too, the accepted norm is to appoint the most experienced teacher or the one having closer relationships with the higher-ups as the manager. When meritocracy is not considered in such cases, incompetent people end up doing the job (Yılmaz & Altınkurt, 2011). This lack of professionalism not only causes a devaluation of the quality in higher education but may also mean ignoring the developmental needs and employee rights of instructors to affect their motivation and their long-term plans in the academia negatively leading them to an ambivalent future. While these problems may originate from command and control leadership styles working with commercial concerns (Sharrock, 2012), this situation actually reflects the leadership culture of the university.

Warwick (1990) states that in implementing equality of opportunity in education, leaders’ adopting a clear leadership is an important condition to be fulfilled. Equality of opportunity can be realized through distributive and positive leadership styles since both of these leadership styles can be associated with collegiality, shared decision-making, responsibilities, a value system, a vision and rewards and recognition and being supportive of team goals (Ameijde, Nelson, Billsberry & Meurs, 2009; Buller, 2013; Buller, 2015). On the opposite side, the leadership style can be authoritarian where the faculty members may feel disempowered and have the feeling of distrust towards the leader (Sternberg, 2015). In such kind of situations, building an effective team who has technical, functional, problem-solving and inter-personal skills can help tackle the problem. Besides this, resorting to the views of all related parties in the institution not only creates a win-win situation (Katzenbach & Smith, 2003) but also lowers the turnover rates (Buller, 2013).

Within this context, this study aims to analyze the perspectives of the academic staff at a private (foundation) university in Turkey as regards the effectiveness of managerial decisions to implement equality of opportunity for all academic staff.  As students have usually been the group to be studied with the topic of equality of opportunity, with this study, academicians’ situation was aimed to be examined through the following research questions:

1. How successful are higher education managers to present equal opportunities to instructors?
2. What are the individual and organizational outcomes of the managerial decisions and practices?

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