Shaping innovative change through concentrated, distributed, or hybrid leadership? Organizational resilience in women’s liberal arts colleges

Abstract

ABSTRACT Decades of research suggest that women’s liberal arts colleges (WLACs) are models of excellence in supporting gender equity in higher education and society generally. But as WLACs face competition from coeducational counterparts for women students, their specialized mission compounds strong external threats to their sustainability. Consequently, these institutions may deploy different leadership approaches through which they synergize social interdependencies across the campus to innovate and thrive. To examine the connection of leadership to innovation at WLACs, we apply concentrated, distributed, and hybrid leadership theories to illuminate multi-campus case-studies of the engagement of administrative and faculty groups in academic changes taking place. Our empirical themes supported flexible perspectives on communication and decision-making: one case-site featured hybrid leadership to coordinate formal (administrative) and informal (faculty and staff) leaders in large-scale efforts, while the other case-site reflected distributed leadership via bottom-up, faculty-driven initiatives in discrete siloes of expertise on campus. Moreover, the study’s findings suggested that cultural and material resources mediated who distributed leadership, how leadership was distributed, and what was distributed, differentiating campuses’ respective social processes and outcomes of change. We discuss implications for theory, practice, and research that collectively emphasize WLACs’ mission-driven social activity, which animates their resilience and public purposes.