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CHAPTERCHAPTER

Conflict and Change: The Limits

and Possibilities of Strategic

Leadership

W

e have learned that change and conflict are at the heart of leadership,
and these issues have shaped the background and the foreground of
this text. If strategic leadership in colleges and universities is about
anything, it is about systematically negotiating the forces of change and the reali-
ties of structural conflict. It is time to bring the dynamics of these issues into
self-conscious focus and to explore the capacities of strategic leadership to deal
with them.
One of the central purposes of this section is to determine realistically the
organizational times and circumstances when strategic leadership will be a more
useful or less useful method of decision making. The reader will know that all
methods have both possibilities and limits as well as conditions under which they
are particularly effective or minimally so. Such is the case for strategic leadership.
Our aim is to weigh the difference that strategic leadership makes under various
conditions of change, crisis, and conflict. If we can understand with some preci-
sion the capacity of strategic leadership to deal with change and conflict, then a
campus will be able to have realistic expectations about what the process can and
cannot accomplish.

STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AND STRUCTURAL CONFLICT

Like all organizations, colleges and universities are filled with conflict. The
word itself calls to mind opposition between and among individuals and groups
along a social and political spectrum that ranges from polite disagreements to
intense personal hostilities, from political infighting to bitter public controversies,
from negotiation to violence. Conflict is everywhere on campuses and elsewhere