The Ambiguities and Possibilities of Leadership in Higher Education 31
leaders who are willing to pursue change, take risks, and challenge the status quo,
and who do not let organizational structures discourage their efforts, are typi-
cally more successful and effective collegiate leaders. They pointedly repudiate
Birnbaum’s systematic critique of strong presidential leadership.
The methods and assumptions used to study the entrepreneurial approach raise
many questions, starting with the authors’ ambiguous connection of entrepreneur-
ial with transforming leadership, which are very different things. The content
of their questionnaire is also problematic, since it tests a relatively narrow set of
self-attributed attitudes as opposed to more objective assessments of presiden-
tial decisions and achievements, or the evaluations of others within the institu-
tion. One also has to wonder how presidents acquire the qualities necessary for
entrepreneurial leadership if they do not already have them, particularly since
they appear to be personal characteristics that are hard or impossible to acquire.
Entrepreneurial leadership does not seem to be a method or process of decision
making that can be learned. It also appears to be the norm of leadership under all
circumstances, rather than having to do with the match between the leader and
the situation of the organization.
Our primary interest in the study, however, concerns not its accuracy but what
it represents in the study of leadership. Unlike the “weak” presidential theories,
the focus here is on the way the legitimate authority of the presidential office
can be combined with the personal characteristics, expertise, and skills of the
president to create a strong form of leadership. More than other analysts, Fisher
and Koch offer a perspective that integrates different dimensions of leadership,
including self-managed behavior, into a single theory.
THE MULTIPLE FRAMES AND STYLES OF LEADERSHIP
Students of organizations have developed theories about the ways that the
structures, politics, people, and cultures of organizations are woven together into
complex patterns. In Reframing Organizations, Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal
(2003) describe what they call four frames, each of which describes a dimension of
an organization, as well as a cognitive lens, a “way of seeing,” that privileges that
dimension in our thinking and experience. This perspective has been adapted and
applied to the analysis of presidential leadership by investigators such as Birnbaum
(1988, 1992), Estella Bensimon (1991), and William G. Tierney (1991). The four
modified frames are (1) the bureaucratic (or administrative), (2) the political,
(3) the collegial, (4) and the symbolic. They are illuminating categories with clear
implications for practice.
As the research suggests, and as experience confirms, individuals apprehend
organizational life and decision-making processes in quite different ways. Some
leaders look through cognitive windows and see political interactions as primary
and pervasive, while others are partially blind to the issues of power, persuasion,
and influence. For other leaders, nothing is more self-evident than formal organi-
zational authority and structures, and the dependence of effective leadership on