Understanding the nature and practice of leadership in higher education: a phenomenological approach

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to interpret the lived experience of Indonesian universities’ leaders in order to offer a new way of understanding leadership and exercising leadership in higher education. Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Phenomenological approach is used to capture the real experience of those leaders in demonstrating how they live and exercise a particular phenomenon of ‘leadership’ in Indonesian university contexts. Seven university leaders from two universities of private and public universities, in the western region of Indonesia, were interviewed. The results of this study describe that leaders define the nature of leadership within the domains of both positivists’ and social constructivism’s via the incorporation of individual characteristics and relational processes. They exercise leadership based on the premise of the exchange of rewards and punishment to meet triple objectives. Such an exchange is mediated with the relational approach reflected in terms such as recognition, soft-touch, affection, and care. These results offer a new way of blended conventional knowledge (positivism and social-constructivism) in defining the nature of leadership in higher education and promote a new model of the theory of what we call ‘neo-transactional leadership’.