Exploring leadership challenges for senior academic leaders of higher education institutions in Ontario, amidst public policy reforms

This interpretivist research study identified and explored the three key (macro-external) challenges faced by academic leaders in HEIs in Ontario, namely: political and institutional leadership, data, gaps in data and measurement techniques, and labour agreements. Senior academic leaders (SALs) in HE navigate systemic neoliberal public policy changes. As policy implementors they exhibit leadership practices and employ systematic Organisational Change Management (OCM) processes to successfully transit their HEIs to the new era. The challenges appear to be social structural reforms that should have been resolved prior to the government of Ontario implementing public policy reforms in HE. However, such social structural reforms have not been fulfilled, and were addressed in the ‘problem statement’. Therefore, OCM processes could not be employed properly and effectively. The current thesis combines leadership sensemaking and identity social cognition, with OCM political, evolutionary, teleological, cultural, and sub-cultural theories to navigate public policy reforms. It then presents a conceptual model that combines political, institutional, structural, and human resource frames for the interpretation of academic leaders’ experiences, and the reframing of the model. Nine SALs of Ontario’s HEIs participated in semi-structured interviews and expressed their perceptions concerning the challenges they encountered while enacting their academic and administrative roles. SALs, despite commonalities on these three key challenges, showed diversity in their roles as academic and administrative leaders. The study contributes to the field of Educational Leadership, focusing on application of OCM practices. Suggestions and recommendations for further research may provide a better understanding of identity and sensemaking theories applied to shared leadership practices specifically in the HE setting, both in Ontario and in Canada more generally.