Leadership Styles and Their Impact on the Effective Development of Faculty Members - Dissertation Example

Education provides the path in which freedom from mental slavery is attained. To this end, higher education is one of the institutions recognize to be most value-laden in modern society (Scott 2004). This highlights the supposition that universities provide the platform for values such as collegiality, institutional autonomy, the pursuit of knowledge, intellectual truth, and academic freedom (Winter 2009). These principles have long been held as an integral and determinative of the identity of universities (Winter 2009).

However, universities are facing the challenge of organizational managerialism, which holds the values of profit-making ideas, and corporate efficiency vis-à-vis the identity and values of universities as they face the changes and demands of the current period (Deem, Hillyard and Reed 2008). In this context, it becomes imperative that universities find the means by which the values of universities and corporate ideologies strike the common ground. In effect, various scholars have addressed this concern (Churchman 2006; Deem et al 2008, Szekeres 2006).

One of the proposed solutions is to find a strategic approach that will be capable of bridging the divide, and that is by looking into university leadership and determining its impact on the development of the faculty members (Winter 2009). From this perspective, understanding the crucial role of leadership in the universities becomes indispensable, as leadership is one of the acknowledged points within an organization that guides and directs the organization as it faces the challenges and transformations entailed in the current period (Armstrong 2006; Jing and Avery 2008).

In this regard, effective leadership is critical in developing, planning, maintaining, and sustaining policies and programs that will support the values and ideals of universities as educational institutions and at the same time integrate the ideologies of corporate efficiency as education moves forward to the 21st century.