ISSN: 2226-6348
Open access
Universities in Malaysia are putting a never-ending effort to ensure academics’ growth through strong leadership. Leadership program such as mentor-mentee is being re-highlighted to help faculties prosper. However, the success of such effort highly depends on leadership style that is not inclined towards hierarchy and bureaucracy. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the dynamics of leadership styles (transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and laissez-faire leadership) exhibited by academics in a faculty of a Malaysian university. This paper offers a descriptive result describing the most practiced leadership styles among the academics. The results indicate that most academics exhibit high level of both transformational and transactional leadership behaviours with the latter being the most frequently used leadership style.
Ali, A. Y. S., Sidow, M. A., & Guleid, H. S. (2013). Leadership styles and job satisfaction: Empirical evidence from Mogadishu universities. European Journal of Management Sciences and Economics, 1(1), 1-10.
Alonderiene, R., & Majauskaite, M. (2016). Leadership style and job satisfaction in higher education institutions. International Journal of Educational Management, 30(1), 140-164.
Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. Collier Macmillan.
Bass, B. M. (1999). Two decades of research and development in transformational leadership. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 8(1), 9-32.
Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1990). Transformational leadership development: Manual for the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Consulting Psychologist Press.
Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1992). Developing transformational leadership: 1992 and beyond. Journal of European Industrial Training, 14(5), 21-27.
Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1994). Improving organisational effectiveness: Through transformational leadership. SAGE.
Bass, B. M., & Bass, R. (2009). The Bass handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications. Simon and Schuster.
Bieletzki, N. (2018). The power of collegiality. Springer.
Bo, Y. (2013). The influence study of transformational leadership in university on teacher's organizational commitment: The construction and verification of a theoretical model. Canadian Social Science, 9(4), 126-137.
Breevaart, K., & Zacher, H. (2019). Main and interactive effects of weekly transformational and laissez?faire leadership on followers’ trust in the leader and leader effectiveness. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 92(2), 384-409.
Brown, F. W., & Moshavi, D. (2002). Herding academic cats: Faculty reactions to transformational and contingent reward leadership by department chairs. Journal of Leadership Studies, 8(3), 79-93.
Bush, T. (2011). Theories of educational leadership and management. Sage.
Charoensukmongkol, P., & Puyod, J. V. (2021). Influence of transformational leadership on role ambiguity and work–life balance of Filipino University employees during COVID-19: does employee involvement matter? International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1-20.
Christopher, J. (2012). Governance paradigms of public universities: An international comparative study. Tertiary Education and Management, 18(4), 335-351.
Demirtas, O., & Akdogan, A. A. (2015). The effect of ethical leadership behavior on ethical climate, turnover intention, and affective commitment. Journal of Business Ethics, 130(1), 59-67.
Heng, M. A., & Marsh, C. J. (2009). Understanding middle leaders: A closer look at middle leadership in primary schools in Singapore. Educational Studies, 35(5), 525-536.
Huang, F., & Marginson, S. (2017). Higher education research in the Asia-Pacific. International Journal of Educational Development, 63, 1-6.
Jenkins, E., D'Aoust, R., de Souza Elias, S., Han, H. R., Sharps, P., & Alvarez, C. (2021). Faculty peer review of teaching taskforce: A quantitative descriptive research study for the peer review process. Nurse Education Today, 1-6.
Khan, N. (2017). Adaptive or transactional leadership in current higher education: A brief comparison. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(3), 178-183.
Kuhnert, K. W. and Lewis P. (1987). ?Transactional and Transformational Leadership: A Constructive/Developmental Analysis. Academy of Management Review, 12, 648-657.
Mathews, K. (2018). Growing our own: Cultivating faculty leadership. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 50(3-4), 88-92.
Northouse, P., G. (2001). Leadership: Theory and practice. SAGE.
Para-González, L., Jiménez-Jiménez, D., & Martínez-Lorente, A. R. (2018). Exploring the mediating effects between transformational leadership and organizational performance. Employee Relations, 40(2), 412-432.
Peters, M. A. (2020). Knowledge socialism: The rise of peer production: Collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Springer Nature.
Phuong, T. T., Cole, S. C., & Zarestky, J. (2018). A systematic literature review of faculty development for teacher educators. Higher Education Research & Development, 37(2), 373-389.
Phuong, T. T., Duong, H. B., & McLean, G. N. (2015). Faculty development in Southeast Asian higher education: A review of literature. Asia Pacific Education Review, 16(1), 107-117.
Robert, V., & Vandenberghe, C. (2021). Laissez-faire leadership and affective commitment: The roles of leader-member exchange and subordinate relational self-concept. Journal of Business and Psychology, 36(4), 533-551.
Rowold, J., & Schlotz, W. (2009). Transformational and transactional leadership and followers’ chronic stress. Leadership review, 9(1), 35-48.
Rydland, M., & Stensaker, I. G. (2018). Mission Possible? How divisional leaders reassemble change initiatives to develop change capacity. In Academy of Management Proceedings (pp. 14229-14260). Academy of Management.
Singh, P. (2014). Intervention of transformational collegial leadership to develop human resources. The International Business & Economics Research Journal, 13(1), 53-68.
Tavanti, M. (2008). Transactional leadership. Leadership: The key concepts, 166-170.
Tabassi, A. A., Ramli, M., Bakar, A. H. A., & Pakir, A. H. K. (2014). Transformational leadership and teamwork improvement: The case of construction firms. Journal of Management Development, 33(10), 1019-1034.
Vinger, G., & Cilliers, F. (2006). Effective transformational leadership behaviours for managing change. SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 4(2), 1-9.
Wallace, D. M., Torres, E. M., & Zaccaro, S. J. (2021). Just what do we think we are doing? Learning outcomes of leader and leadership development. The Leadership Quarterly, 1-13.
Williams, J. R. (2007). Conceptualization of leadership and leadership development by academic department heads in colleges of agriculture at land grant institutions: A qualitative study (Doctoral dissertation). Oklahoma State University.
Yukl, G. A. (2013). Leadership in organizations. Pearson Education.
In-Text Citation: (Zulkifly et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Zulkifly, N. A., Ismail, I. A., Rami, A. A. M., & Nawi, N. R. C. (2022). Leadership Styles among Faculty Academics in a Malaysian University: A Preliminary Insight. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 11(3), 725–736.
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode