Session Information
26 SES 12 B, Topics on Educational Leadership: Adaptive Leadership, Health and Wellbeing, and Middle Leaders
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper aims to highlight diversity in educational leadership by exploring the middle leader role without formal managerial power in Higher Education (HE). Based on ongoing research including a systematic literature review this paper contributes new insights and perspectives on the role's possibilities, challenges, and limitations. The study asks the following questions:
- how is the middle leader role constructed as a solution to which problem?
- how can the middle leader role adequately function in higher education organisations?
The middle leaders may be labelled as study leaders, educational leaders, course coordinators, or programme leaders. A common characteristic is that they are both teachers, and researchers, and additionally are formally appointed to take special organisational responsibility for coordinating and developing education/teaching. Empirically, the role seems quite implicit and hence, invisible, where the middle leaders find themselves on their own, navigating tensions between a formally appointed role and the lack of formal role structures, expectations, and managerial power. In research, there are a limited number of English-speaking and Scandinavian studies focusing on the role. In some of the few studies, a common theme is that educational leaders often lack formal power to lead and thus, are caught in the middle between management and staff (Gjerde & Alvesson, 2020; Marshall, 2012). Even though there are individual studies, and the research interest has been around for some time, the field is nevertheless sparse and fragmented, lacking a more robust and explicit picture of how these middle leader roles are organisationally constructed and how they can handle the role.
In general educational leadership has over the last two decades,become a common response to quality demands in HE (e.g. Stensaker, Elken, & Maassen, 2019, p. 91), where leadership is understood as having an impact on the quality of student learning (e.g. Cardno, 2014, p. 352) and where educational leadership is needed to support educational development in local collegial contexts (e.g. Mårtensson & Roxå, 2016, p. 248). In research, educational leadership is a broad and messy concept. For example, educational leadership is often linked to the concept of distributed leadership commonly understood as an advantageous way for management to delegate some of their decision-making power to special responsible employees (e.g. Kjeldsen, Quick, Jønsson, & Andersen, 2020, p. 54). The idea is that management can place formal managerial power on middle leaders outside of traditional management structures. Educational leadership can also be related to middle leaders both with and without formal managerial power in the same study (e.g. Bryman, 2007; Grunefeld et al., 2017) if these different leaders have to do with influencing the goal-directed behaviour of others (Bryman, 2007, pp. 694-695). Both examples are ignoring the fact that middle leaders without formal power have different possibilities than those with formal power to influence the behaviour of others within the authority and power structures. Given this background, it is relevant to distinguish the middle leader in this study from those with fixed managerial roles and who are part of hierarchies and thus explore the role as a role ‘in itself’ (Lassen, 2020, p. 265).
Theoretically, the paper draws upon and is inspired by Systems Theory, formulated by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). The theory explicitly focuses on organisational systems and structures, including the concept of role and function that resonates with the focus of this study. Through a functional methodology (Luhmann, 2000, p. 94), it becomes possible to observe functional equivalents, by “[…] considering whether there are special system-dependent conditions” (Nissen, 2014, p. 189), that constructs and affects the middle leader’s possibility to function more adequately.
Method
This ongoing case study of middle leaders without managerial power (November 2022 to May 2023) is situated in one university in Denmark. With the study, the aim is to explore how the middle leader role is constructed and adequately can function in a cross-faculty investigation over the five faculties. The intention is to search for functional equivalents, by “[…] considering whether there are special system-dependent conditions” (Nissen, 2014, p. 189), that construct and either support or inhibit the middle leader handling the role. Methodologically, the study consists of a combination of different strategies, both qualitative and quantitative. Both strategies are constructed from concepts of the theoretical framework guiding the collection of empirical data. Concurrently, the empirical data specifies and challenges the chosen theoretical concepts. The approach, therefore, becomes abductive. The mixed method design seeks to create a nuanced picture of the research object through both “complementarity: […] clarification of the results from one method with the results from another, [and] expansion: […] to extend the breadth and range of inquiry by using different methods for different inquiry components” (Bryman, 2006, p. 105). Firstly, the qualitative part of the design is carried out through observations, an audio diary, and interviews, respectively. A total of 15 middle leaders - three from each faculty – were self-selected into the study. The purpose is to find thematic themes about the construction of middle leaders. Observations and Audio diary focus on the middle leader's collaboration with different roles in the organisation e.g., colleagues, students, or management. The observations are performed in a range of formal meeting settings. The Audio diary is recorded by the middle leader and aimed at capturing ad-hoc tasks - tasks that come in on an ongoing basis. Interviews include the middle leader, a formal leader, and a colleague to obtain information about how the role is constructed from different organisational role perspectives. Secondly, the quantitative part relies on a questionnaire constructed from binary schematic recognition/non-recognition. Thus, both recognition and non-recognition of themes from the qualitative studies are pivotal. The questionnaire is distributed to a larger range of relevant informants at the university. The intent is to gather reflections, on whether the themes are rejected or accepted in other contexts. Through this nuanced picture, it becomes possible to answer the two research questions focusing on the organisational construction of the role and how the middle leader can adequately handle the role.
Expected Outcomes
As described in the introduction, this paper is a part of ongoing research on educational leadership and presents a preliminary analysis. Some of the provisional findings demonstrate that i) there are major differences in what problems the middle leaders are expected to solve seen from different role perspectives, ii) that there is a lack of explicit organisational structures and support that helps the middle leader to know what is expected and as such how to handle the role in practice and iii) that the role is organisationally quite invisible. Firstly, middle leaders in education can become invisible due to the complexity of their tasks, making it challenging to gauge their impact. In contrast, success in research is more easily measured through funding grants and publications. Secondly, invisibility is a matter of prestige. Historically, universities have traditionally valued research over education and as such, educators are not given the same level of unequivocal prestige or recognition for their contributions to educational progress and development. In summary, this case study intends to highlight which problems in HE the middle leader role is becoming the solution to. Through a systems theoretical analysis of the range of empirical data, the study presents perspectives on how middle leaders adequately can function in their role.
References
Bryman, A. (2006). Integrating quantitative and qualitative research: How is it done? Qualitative research, 6(1), 97-113. Bryman, A. (2007). Effective leadership in higher education: a literature review. Studies in Higher Education, 32(6), 693-710. doi:10.1080/03075070701685114 Cardno, C. (2014). The functions, attributes and challenges of academic leadership in New Zealand polytechnics. International Journal of Educational Management. Gjerde, S., & Alvesson, M. (2020). Sandwiched: Exploring role and identity of middle managers in the genuine middle. Human relations, 73(1), 124-151. Grunefeld, H., Prins, F., Van Tartwijk, J., Van Der Vaart, R., Loads, D., Turner, J., . . . Wubbels, T. (2017). Faculty Development for Educational Leadership. In (pp. 73-101): Springer International Publishing. Kjeldsen, A. M., Quick, C. N., Jønsson, T. F., & Andersen, L. B. (2020). Distribueret ledelse i den offentlige sektor. København: Djøf Forlag. Lassen, S. (2020). Ressourcepersonens hyperorientering: En empirisk undersøgelse af ressourcepersonens rolle og funktion i den danske folkeskole. (PhD). Syddansk Universitet, Odense. Retrieved from https://www.sdu.dk/da/forskning/phd/phd_skoler/phd_humaniora/ph,-d-,d,-d-,-afhandlinger Luhmann, N. (2000). Sociale systemer: Grundrids til en almen teori (J. Cederstrøm, N. Mortensen, & J. Rasmussen, Trans.). København: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Marshall, S. G. (2012). Educational middle change leadership in New Zealand: the meat in the sandwich. The International Journal of Educational Management, 26(6), 502-528. doi:10.1108/09513541211251361 Mårtensson, K., & Roxå, T. (2016). Leadership at a local level – Enhancing educational development. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 44(2), 247-262. doi:10.1177/1741143214549977 Nissen, M. (2014). At analysere refleksionsteorier: Specificering og anvendelse af den funktionelle metode. In G. Harste & M. Knudsen (Eds.), Systemteoretiske analyser (pp. 183-208). Frederiksberg: Nyt fra samfundsvidenskaberne. Stensaker, B., Elken, M., & Maassen, P. (2019). Studieprogramledelse – et spørgsmål om organisering? Uniped, 42(1), 91-105. doi:10.18261/issn.1893-8981-2019-01-07
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