Reimagining Leadership: Promoting Faculty Collaboration Beyond Hierarchical Structures

Abstract

Traditional graded management representations remain to outline governance across higher education institutions, prompting executive, faculty relations, and academic output. However, the rising intricacy of academic exertion, interdisciplinary insistence, and the requirement for comprehensive institutional cultures entail a change toward relational methods to leadership. This study explores how relational leadership-stranded in trust, mutuality, collective agency, and joint sense-making-bids a justifiable alternate to hierarchical structures for promoting faculty collaboration. Illustrating on current leadership theories and worldwide higher education scholarship, this study offers a logical summary of defiance integrated into hierarchical structures, deliberates the merits of collective assignation, and recommends a relational leadership context appropriate for contemporary academic institutions. It culminates with suggestions for entrenching relational performs in institutional strategy, governance, and faculty development ingenuities.