Faculty and chair perspectives on leadership and it's impact on departmental outcomes

Higher education is experiencing a changing context. Strong leadership is demanded to overcome these challenging times. While management literature offers the transactional-transformational leadership model, the higher education literature argues that applying a managerial leadership model to the academic context ignores the principles of academe. This study examines the relevance of such a model within the academic context. More specifically, the study focuses on transactional-transformational leadership styles and the extent to which chairs' self and faculty members' perceptions of chairs' leadership converge. The study also examines the perceptions of the influence of leadership style on departmental outcomes, extra effort, effectiveness, and satisfaction. This study found that chairs and faculty perceive transformational leadership best characterizes effective leadership. A significant overall group difference was found, suggesting that chairs view themselves to be more of a transformational leader than faculty perceives them to be. Also, chairs and faculty perceived transformational leadership to best predict the departmental outcomes, however there was a divergence between groups as to which transformational factors are predictors of the three outcomes