22 Strategic Leadership
of them focus on the qualities, expertise, and skills required for effectiveness in
specific positions of authority, such as chief academic officer or department chair.
In this regard, they are close to the traditional motifs of management education,
and development, as a sampling of the enormous number of recent books makes
clear (see, e.g., Diamond 2002; Ferren and Stanton 2004; Gmelch and Miskin
2004; Green and McDade 1994; Gunsalis 2006; Hoppe and Speck 2003; Krahen-
buhl 2004; Ramsden 1998; Ruben 2004b, especially chapter 8). Although these
works may consider broader findings and theories concerning leadership, their
primary attention goes to the tasks and operational responsibilities of a given
academic position. They may cover such topics as faculty appointment, evalua-
tion, development and tenure, curricular change, affirmative action and equity,
legal questions, planning, budgets, compensation, group dynamics, and conflict
resolution. Especially useful for academic professionals who may have little or
no administrative experience, these books address one aspect of the leadership
equation: “What skills and knowledge do I need to exercise my responsibilities
effectively?” (The American Council of Education has led the way over many
years in developing materials, programs, and bibliographies on leadership devel-
opment in this vein.^1 )
Interactive Leadership
The contemporary motif of leadership as a process of mutual influence between
leaders and followers that mobilizes commitment to common purposes also has
emerged clearly as a theme in the literature (see, e.g., Davis 2003, Kouzes and
Posner 2003, Shaw 2006). Peter Eckel and Adrianna Kezar (2003) describe
a transformational change model that parallels several aspects of interactive
direction-setting leadership. In using the motif of legitimacy as the threshold
condition for transformative presidential leadership, Rita Bornstein (2003) dem-
onstrates how the concept answers to the multiple expectations of key campus
participants and other constituencies. The publications of the Institutional Leader-
ship Project, directed by Robert Birnbaum (1988, 1992) in the late 1980s, also show
a clear understanding of many aspects of interactive leadership. In none of these
cases, though, have the implications of reciprocal leadership been fashioned into
a systematic method of organizational decision making and leadership (Bensimon,
Neumann, and Birnbaum 1991). Paul Ramsden (1998) comes close to doing so,
yet he also considers leadership as a set of qualities, skills, and characteristics.
As we shall see, the guidebooks to strategic planning in higher education move
largely within the orbit of management, though the motif of interactive leadership
is sometimes a tacit and emergent theme (Sevier 2000). Representative articles
and collections of studies from journals and other sources on governance, man-
agement, and leadership also reflect several of the motifs of interactive leadership
(M. C. Brown 2000; Kezar 2000; Peterson, Chaffee, and White 1991; Peterson,
Dill, Mets, et al. 1997). They offer a variety of insights on themes that have a
direct or indirect bearing on strategic leadership, such as symbols and sense