Blended Leadership: From Conceptualization to Practice

Abstract

This chapter has a dual purpose; first, to present recent research findings on leadership in the higher education sector that provides the best opportunity to build collaboration between professional staff and academics and, second, to introduce the six following chapters that provide case studies of how leadership for collaboration between administrative and professional staff and academics in universities can be built. The chapter first identifies the changing context of universities that is resulting in increasingly complex and more diverse work carried out by a more divergent group of administrative and professional staff and academics. It then presents a summary of some of the recent research into leadership in higher education, relying primarily on recent Australian empirical research into how to build leadership capacity for learning and teaching in Australian universities. This research identifies the value of a distributed leadership approach in not only building leadership capacity but also in encouraging collaboration between administrative and professional staff and academics in a “third space” where the expertise of all is shared.