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Adrianna J. Kezar is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southern California.
Jaime Lester is Associate Professor of Higher Education at George Mason University.

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Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................viiPreface...........................................................................................................................ixPART I Background and Context....................................................................................................11. Grassroots Leadership: Making the Invisible Visible............................................................................32. Framing the Study: Tempered Radicals Framework.................................................................................293. Developing a Study of Grassroots Leaders: Approach to Inquiry, Assumptions, and Institutional Descriptions.....................44PART II Individual and Group Grassroots Phenomena................................................................................694. Meet the Grassroots Leaders....................................................................................................715. Tactics and Strategy for Creating Meaningful Change............................................................................976. Analyzing and Overcoming Obstacles and Challenges for Grassroots Leadership....................................................1217. Encounters with Authority and Power: Ways Grassroots Leaders Navigate Resistance and Oppression................................1488. Grassroots Leaders' Understanding of Power and Effects on Leadership Style.....................................................1779. Remaining Resilient............................................................................................................199PART III Organizational Grassroots Phenomena, Implications, and Conclusion.......................................................22510. Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up: Challenges and Opportunities........................................................................22711. Leading in a Time of Corporatization: The Impact of Institutional Structures and Culture......................................25012. Encouraging and Supporting Faculty and Staff Grassroots Leadership............................................................26613. Moving Forward: Leadership Implications and Future Research...................................................................287Appendix: Grassroots Leadership...................................................................................................317Notes.............................................................................................................................335References........................................................................................................................341Index.............................................................................................................................349

Chapter One

Making the Invisible Visible

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Janine is a biologist who has watched students struggle in her classes for years—particularly those who cannot overcome math deficiencies. Few institutional supports exist, and she has no place to send students for additional academic assistance. After talking to several other colleagues, she realizes the issue is prevalent in other science majors. Janine discovers some helpful teaching techniques and new texts she can use with students, and she begins to offer an informal math support skills group that gains great popularity. Students tell her she is fundamentally changing their understanding of math. Yet this effort begins to create a great deal of additional work. She speaks with her department chair about getting a course release to offer the support group, but he feels that his hands are tied because of tight finances and refuses. Janine organizes several colleagues to contact the chair to discuss the importance of the support group. After a few months of communication by colleagues and students, the chair accedes and temporarily allows her a course release. In the meantime, Janine sets out to get broader campus support for math support skills. She collects data (pre-and posttests related to performance) in her support group to demonstrate the impact of her tutoring efforts. She presents these data to the academic senate and administration. Within the year, a math support center opens. Although resources are temporary, if the center demonstrates outcomes similar to her support group, campus administrators agree to provide ongoing funds. Over the next two years, Janine works with the center director to set up an advisory board of faculty and to gain campus support, and she collects data on the efficacy of the center. Many faculty and staff talk about Janine's work with pride—she identified a real need and developed a change that made students more successful. While this problem had existed for years on campus, it had never been addressed and maybe never would have been without Janine's efforts. This book is about people like Janine—bottom-up leaders who make important changes that often go largely unnoticed, unacknowledged, and often unsupported. Greater understanding of people like Janine may lead to more support for bottom-up changes on college campuses that can improve student learning and college completion.

Leadership remains one of the most important topics across a range of fields because studies continuously demonstrate that the success and well-being of any institution or society depend on the functionality, effectiveness, and promotion of leaders and leadership (Conger & Benjamin, 1999). Traditionally, leadership research has focused on individuals in positions of power, such as presidents and CEOs, and has seen leadership as an individual attribute (Kezar, Carducci, & Contreras-McGavin, 2006a).1 But, in the last twenty years, a variety of scholars have proposed that leadership is not synonymous with authority and have examined the role of other individuals within the organization and their contributions to institutional operations and change (Astin & Leland, 1991; Kanter, 1983; Meyerson, 2003; Pearce & Conger, 2003). These newer definitions of leadership also attempt to distinguish the work of managers and leaders because often the work of managers (budgeting, hiring, decision making) has become synonymous with leadership (Bass, 2009). Instead, the nonhierarchical views of leadership have defined and understood leadership to be distinctive from management (although the two are not mutually exclusive) and involved creating change (Astin & Leland, 1991; Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Komives & Wagner, 2009; Pearce & Conger, 2003). Furthermore, leadership has expanded to be considered a process that involves groups and is not executed only by individuals. Over time, departing from traditional, hierarchical, and authority-based models, new models of leadership have emerged, such as team-based, shared, and distributed leadership (Astin & Leland, 1991; Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Komives & Wagner, 2009; Pearce & Conger, 2003). Team and shared models identify and examine the role of individuals outside authority in leadership and consider leadership a collective process that is working to create change (Pearce & Conger, 2003). In our research, we defined leadership as an effort by groups or individuals to create change, drawing on these newer definitions of leadership that distinguished management from leadership and did not assume that authority was synonymous with leadership.

The business and nonprofit literatures are replete with texts that describe ways to improve team-based forms of leadership and create more ownership among employees and further innovation within organizations (Bass, 2009; Pearce & Conger, 2003). Within shared leadership, leadership is broadly distributed among a set of individuals and decentralized to groups of leaders who act in the role traditionally reserved for supervisors or managers (Pearce & Conger, 2003; Senge, 1990). Also, leadership may be viewed as bidirectional between what have traditionally been called leaders and followers. Both downward and upward hierarchical influence is examined. Traditional models of leadership focus only on the downward influence of leaders on subordinates and also focus on a single individual in authority who plays a leadership role.

A variety of research studies support the need to expand leadership from the hands of a few leaders to a broader group of stakeholders in organizations (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Pearce & Conger, 2003). In fact, Pearce and Conger demonstrate that studies over the past 100 years have pointed in this direction but that the overwhelming bias toward heroic, individual, hierarchical leaders prevented scholars and practitioners from conceptualizing and adopting the outcomes of these numerous studies. In other words, the efficacy of involving multiple individuals outside positions of authority and working in collectives kept emerging in studies as related to important leadership outcomes such as problem solving, change, innovation, and strategic decision making. Outcomes supported by shared leadership include increased problem-solving abilities, greater creativity, organizational effectiveness, effectiveness of groups, more motivation and dedication by member of leadership groups, satisfaction with decision making, greater social integration and more positive relationships within organizations, and collective efficacy (Pearce & Conger, 2003). Most team-based, shared, and distributed leadership models expand who is considered a leader but still connect the team-based leadership to the agenda and direction established by those in positions of authority. For example, people in positions of authority form teams for their purposes and goals. This book is rooted in definitions of and conceptions of shared leadership, which expand definitions of leadership to include a greater number of people, to conceptualize it as a collective, and to include those not in authority positions. This book also takes a significant departure from this tradition. We examine bottom-up leadership that can be largely independent of top-down efforts. We explain this departure from shared leadership later in this chapter.

While the corporate and nonprofit literature has shifted emphasis quite dramatically over the years, the educational literature, particularly in higher education, has been slow to move to team-based and non-authority-based models of leadership (Kezar et al., 2006a). Academics may perceive that the tradition of shared governance reflects a shared leadership process on college campuses and that expanding notions of leadership is unnecessary (Birnbaum, 1992; Cohen & March, 1974). Yet, mostly a traditional authority-based notion and individual-focused notion of leadership are reflected in the higher education literature (Bensimon, Neumann, & Birnbaum, 1989; Kezar et al., 2006a). Higher education scholarship on leadership is geared toward enhancing the effectiveness of individuals in positions of authority: college presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs (samples include Birnbaum, 1992; Fisher & Koch, 1996, 2004; Fisher, Tack & Wheeler, 1988; Kerr & Gade, 1986; Lucas, 1994). A plethora of books and articles equates presidential leadership with the notion of leadership on campus. In fact, Cohen and March's book Leadership and Ambiguity (1974) questions the president's authority on campus as leader, and at the time it was published many considered it blasphemous. Twenty years of debate followed the book's publication because it challenged this fundamental assumption (Bensimon et al., 1989; Kerr & Gade, 1986). In a similar, more subtle attempt to make a departure from the top-down approaches to leadership, Birnbaum's (1992) book on academic leadership focuses on the prominent role of presidents who should recognize other campus stakeholders to be successful leaders.

It is surprising that the leadership literature is focused on those in positions of authority given that the organizational literature in higher education documents faculty, as professionals, having autonomy in the workplace, defining much of their own working environment, and developing mechanisms such as shared governance to have a voice (and presumably play a leadership role) within the institution (Baldridge et al., 1977; Birnbaum, 1988; Clark, 1983; Duryea, 1973). For example, Clark's extensive study of college and university organization notes that there are dual authority structures, with administrators having hierarchical and faculty having professional and expert-based power and authority. Also, the overriding emphasis in the leadership literature on the power of presidents and boards seems problematic given the many constraints and limitations on their power over faculty- and professional-based power, the influence of departments that have delegated decision making on many campuses, collective bargaining, and even external groups such as accreditators or state policy makers (Birnbaum, 1988; Clark, 1983; Cohen & March, 1974).

In a review of the leadership literature, Bensimon, Neumann, and Birnbaum (1989) call attention to the lack of connection between the organizational and leadership literatures in higher education. They argue that leadership plays out differently than is often presented because of these distinctive characteristics of higher education—faculty autonomy and professional status, academic freedom, dual authority structures, and the like. The argument made by Bensimon and her coauthors (1989) builds off Cohen and March's (1974) leadership research that found presidents to be constrained in their authority by the structure and organizational context of higher education, particularly within the research university context, where faculty have more power than in other sectors. Cohen and March document the issues of faculty autonomy, departmental delegated authority, shared governance structures such as committees and senates, and even the roles of boards and external constituencies who can assert their power. Given these multiple influences and sources of authority, individuals such as presidents are constrained. Cohen and March also point to the ambiguity of goals within higher education pursuing teaching, research and service missions, and the complex web or structure of universities with the proliferation of divisions without a simple bureaucracy but instead a professional bureaucracy that makes lines of authority diffuse and unclear and somewhat chaotic. Cohen and March labeled these various characteristics and constraints as an organized anarchy.

While later scholars have debated the relevance of this characterization for other institutional types beyond research universities (Birnbaum, 1988; Kerr & Gade, 1986), the work is significant for relating organizational context and structure to the process of leadership, which had largely been decontextualized. Bensimon and her coauthors (1989) argue that top-down leadership models used within corporations were not a strong fit for higher education with its unique organizational structure. While much of the leadership literature that followed did not accept the challenge posed by Bensimon and her colleagues to reenvision leadership in higher education as distinctive from corporate, top-down models and to contextualize leadership research within our best knowledge about organizations (ambiguous goal, professional bureaucracy, dual authority structures), Birnbaum and Neumann, writing individually and together, created works that were embedded within this new perspective on studying leadership (Kezar et al., 2006a). A recent review of the leadership literature in higher education by Kezar and her coauthors documents that the literature remains mostly devoid of the organizational context, maintains the top-down authority-based view of leadership, and sees leadership as an individual, not collective, process or phenomenon. We point out these important pieces that deviate from the overarching trends in the literature as we are building on this tradition of departing from a top-down view of leadership and authority and conceptualizing leadership as shaped by higher education organizational theory and research.

Another book that takes a significant departure and has examined team-based forms of leadership on college campus is Bensimon and Neumann's (1993) Redesigning Collegiate Leadership. While the research focuses on presidential cabinets and still connects leadership to authority, the book focuses on how higher education leadership should be more collective and team based given the organization of higher education with professional staff, shared governance, and the need to draw on expertise throughout the organization. Yet, Bensimon and Neumann's book is important as it was the first in higher education to consider leadership to be a collective process. In recent years, a few studies in higher education have begun to examine leadership from beyond the perspective of those in positions of authority. Helen Astin and Carol Leland's (1991) study of leaders in the women's movement examined faculty who created major changes on college campuses. Their research challenged conventional notions of leadership—leadership as the use of power by authority figures to create a change defined by executives—and reframed leadership as a process of collective action by individuals throughout an organization who use unique strategies such as empowerment and consciousness raising to facilitate change. Astin and Leland demonstrate how women who were not in positions of power created significant change on college campuses and played important leadership roles.

More recently, Lynn Safarick (2003) and Jeni Hart (2005, 2007) have demonstrated how women's studies or centers for women have played leadership roles from their "marginal" status outside the circles of power on campus: transforming the curriculum, diversifying faculty and staff, and changing the climate of college campuses. Also, a recent National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) publication (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2004) focused on the leadership role student affairs staff played in facilitating civil rights movements on college campuses. Finally, Wergin's (2007) edited book on "leadership in place" argues for the importance of faculty leadership outside formal positions such as senate president or department chair. Collectively, all of these studies suggest that important leadership does happen among faculty and staff and outside those in positions of authority on campus. However, we know very little about this leadership beyond these few historical or single-campus case studies. What we are lacking is a comprehensive understanding of the experiences, role, strategies, and practices of bottom-up or grassroots leaders in educational settings. We also know very little about how bottom-up and top-down efforts work in concert.

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Excerpted from Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadershipby Adrianna J. Kezar Jaime Lester Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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