Researching Leadership Styles in Higher Education in the Arab World Using Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frame Framework: A Literature Review

Abstract

The growing challenges that the higher education sector in the Arab world has been facing in the past few years, including the seismic changes imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, call for "a new level of excellence" from the leaders of Arab higher education institutions. Bolman and Deal (2017) believe that the increasing complexity and needs of modern management put pressure on organizations and leaders to adopt a multi-layered framework to improve performance and results. They suggest that leaders should look at and approach organizational issues from four perspectives or lenses, which they called "Frames". The four frames are: Structural (the Rational side of organization), Human Resources (the People side of organization), Political (the Conflict side of organization), and Symbolic (the Cultural side of organization). This paper is the result of a literature review that examined the use of the Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frame Leadership Framework to assess the leadership styles in the educational sector. The findings show that there is a considerable and growing body of work in the western world using the four-frame framework to assess the leadership styles in the higher education sector and evaluate their impact on organizational effectiveness. The results also show that leaders are increasingly adopting a multi-framed approach. However, in the Arab world, the literature review indicates that the research in this area needs to be further developed as the number of publications remain very limited. It also indicates that the researched leaders don’t usually use a multi-layered approach to their management but rather prefer one or two frames. The importance of this paper is that it establishes the need for more research in this area in the higher education sector in the Arab world.