46 Strategic Leadership
to the core of the issue. No matter how skilled the leader of constituencies, how
deft the drafter of collegial bylaws, how skilled the storyteller, or how shrewd
the tactician, conflict persists. These forms of leadership have not yet found the
conflict with which they must fundamentally contend.
STRUCTURAL CONFLICT IN VALUES
To grasp the full texture of the problem of structural conflict, we need to under-
stand it in terms of the decision-making culture or meta-culture of colleges and
universities. “Culture” can mean many things, but here it refers to the shared
paradigms, values, and norms through which organizations of higher learning
build their systems of decision making. They apply widely, even around much of
the globe (Ramsden 1998; Tabatoni 1996; Watson 2000). By penetrating the level
of culture as a system of beliefs and practices, we find the place at which people
understand themselves to be exercising their moral commitments and profes-
sional responsibilities in academic communities. We reach them at the point of
their investment in a set of values and processes that comprise the foundations
of a decision-making culture. We should seek first to understand academic pro-
fessionals as participants in shaping a culture rather than explain them by their
behavior or their bylaws.
To be sure, every organization also has its own distinctive culture. Practices
like shared governance are markedly different in tone, emphasis, and content
from one college to the next. One of the most influential writers in the field,
Edgar Schein, defines the culture of a group as “a pattern of shared basic assump-
tions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and
internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and,
therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think,
and feel in relation to those problems” (1992, 12). Many contemporary scholars
of higher education have written in similar ways on the importance of campus
culture and climate, including issues of race and gender (see, e.g., Birnbaum
1992; Chaffee and Tierney 1988; B. R. Clark 1987, 1991,1998; Dill 1997; Gum-
port 2000; Hortado 2000; Kuh and Whitt 2000; Peterson and Spencer 1991;
Tierney 1991; Toma, Dubrow, and Hartley 2005). One of the tasks of effective
leadership is to understand and mobilize the norms and practices of the culture
in solving problems and setting directions for the future. Schein suggests that it
is possible “that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is create and
manage cultures” (1985, 2).
The common culture of academic decision making shapes the self-
understanding of academic professionals at deep levels of their values and
beliefs. Until that level is reached, efforts to develop an integrative under-
standing and process of leadership will be frustrated. The way to move beyond
these frustrations is to locate the problems of academic decision making in a
structural conflict of values.