Faculty Leadership Analysis

Faculty Leadership
Judith Little (2000) has described a school education analog of college and university faculty leadership, called “teacher leadership,” where “teachers are expected to exert the kind of influence on one another that would enhance success and satisfaction with students” (Little, 2000, p. 393). In a historical analysis of the evolution of the profession of teaching in both schools and post-secondary institutions, Gerald Grant and Christine Murray (1999) delineated how “schoolteaching and professing” have institutionalized differently over time, and yet they shared the “essential acts of teaching” (p. 32). Schoolteachers and college and university faculty share the essential acts of “knowing the student, engaging and motivating,

34-41). The exploration of faculty leadership is even further refined when we examine its fluid and fertile context – the systems and cultural perspectives on describing leadership in the academy.
When universities and colleges are roundly criticized for their lack of effectiveness, Max Weber’s (1947) efficient machine bureaucracy is often the comparison ideal in mind. However, the academic organization’s unique “messiness” of multiple missions is more suitably understood through alternative frames such as “cultures” and “cybernetic systems.” The result of this alternative analysis is a revised appreciation of the more complex relationships between organizational effectiveness and organizational structure in college and university organizations.
The Socio-Technical

Emery and Trist (1960) introduced the phrase “socio-technical system” to describe an organization that comprised of people interacting with each other (a social system) and choosing tools and techniques (a technical system) to obtain organizational outcomes. Emery borrowed the concept of the organization as an “open system” from Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1950, 1968), who proposed that many of the systems found in the biological and physical sciences expressed a design where all things influenced all other things. Since all the elements of a system functioned simultaneously as both cause and effect in their mutual influence, von Bertalanffy (1950, 1968) argued that identifying cause and effect chains would be impossible. Emery and Trist (1960) suggested that this was equally applicable in the reality of human systems in organizations.
Relationships between organizational effectiveness and organizational structures are predicated on the foundational concept of the organization as a socio-technical system. In the logic of this model, high performance is obtained when the “design of the technical system and the design of the social system of work were congruent” (Nadler & Gerstein, 1992, p.115). Thus the Weberian bureaucracy is a highly efficient socio-technical system. However, such logic fails to include