Global perspectives on leadership and change in higher education: A scoping review of empirical studies

Leadership plays a critical role in navigating institutional change in higher education, particularly in the context of global disruptions, policy shifts, and increasing demands for equity. While substantial scholarship has focused on senior executive leadership, the roles of deans and middle-level leaders in implementing and mediating institutional change remain comparatively underexplored. This scoping review synthesizes evidence from 24 empirical studies published between 2014 and 2024 across 22 countries. Guided by the frameworks of Arksey and O’Malley and Levac et al., studies were identified through systematic searches in ERIC, Education Research Complete, and Academic Search Complete, and analysed using thematic synthesis. Institutional change initiatives most commonly involved crisis response, curriculum reform, policy restructuring, and digital transformation, with qualitative approaches predominating (n = 21). This review proposes a novel four-domain model of leadership strategies encompassing affective, strategic, structural, and ethical domains. Across the studies, deans and middle-level leaders emerged as pivotal actors who enacted distributed leadership, fostered stakeholder engagement, and mediated faculty resistance during reform implementation. Persistent challenges included faculty resistance, limited resources, and policy ambiguity. Faculty resistance and resource constraints were the most consistent barriers to sustainable reform, underscoring the importance of adaptive, collaborative, and ethically grounded leadership. This review advances a conceptual framework to inform leadership development and policy design in higher education.