Academic Leadership: Fundamental Building Blocks
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The research described in this paper seeks to contribute to a body of knowledge to
inform practice in the area of academic leadership and the development of academic
coordinators.
The Role of Academic Coordinators
Academic coordinators are those staff that have responsibility for the design and the
delivery of programs within universities. They perform multiple roles which span
management, administration and academic leadership. They are the main point of
contact for prospective and current students, for employers and for academic and
administrative staff working on programs and courses. In a changing environment, they
perform a complex set of functions which individually and collectively have a significant
impact on the effectiveness of teaching and the learning of students.
A small pilot study conducted in 2005 in the Division of Business at the University of
South Australia indicated that both postgraduate and undergraduate academic
coordinators frequently feel frustrated and incapable of performing effectively the full
range of functions required of them. Many believed that they were undervalued and that
their role was poorly understood and supported by their managers, as well as overly
administrative (Leask, 2005). Given the importance of the role of academic
coordinators, their direct and indirect influence on the learning of students and the
complexity of the environment in which they work, it was thought to be timely to bring
together research on leadership and on academic staff development to develop tools
and resources to develop their leadership capabilities. This paper uses the Integrated
Competing Values Framework (ICVF), which is well established in the leadership
literature, to assist in understanding how the leadership capacity of academic
coordinators might be developed (Vilkinas & Cartan, 2001, 2006).
A Leadership Framework
The integrating competing values framework (ICVF) is a useful framework for illustrating
the form that academic leadership could take for academic coordinators and as such is
supported by the work of Marshall (2006).
At the heart of the ICVF is the observation that there are two key dimensions to
effective management—a people-task dimension and an external-internal focus
dimension (Vilkinas & Cartan, 2006). This model is a development of an earlier
framework by Quinn and his colleagues (Quinn, 1984, 1988; Quinn, Faerman,
Thompson, & McGrath, 2003; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983). The model uses these two
dimensions to create a four-quadrant model (see Figure 1).
