Building a leadership pipeline for deans in business schools

Amann, Wolfgang (2021) Building a leadership pipeline for deans in business schools. Doctor of Education thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

The management education industry is in flux. Technological change impacts course delivery. Stakeholder demands diverge. As a result, institutions, such as the United Nations with its PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education) initiative, and various scholars call for more ethics and a more balanced impact on society. Parts of the corporate sector use business schools as an effective recruitment pool and advocate customer orientation when dealing with institutions. Additional industry trends, such as commercialisation, internationalisation, consolidation and intensifying competition, increase the level of adversity and the challenges that business school leaders face. Recurring crises, such as the health-related Covid-19 throughout the year 2020, aggravate the situation and challenge established solutions. A key question is therefore: How do we ensure that adequately qualified and highly motivated individuals rise to the upper echelons? In business schools, dynamics do not naturally encourage leadership development. Younger scholars must master research and/or teaching skills, none of which represent the core skill set needed to lead a business school. Leadership pipelines with clearly defined stages have been in use in the non-academic corporate sector for a while. This thesis investigates the potential for business schools to rely on such pipelines too, asking the specific research question of how business school deans experience their leadership development for their roles. Adopting a grounded theory approach, this thesis relies on in-depth interviews of deans located in a number of countries. The emerging substantive, i.e. context-specific, grounded theory suggests a better depiction of the phenomenon analogy-wise as well as semantics-wise by proposing a leadership-oriented ship canal. Several fundamental assumptions diverge, such as being less linear, less cumulative, less sequential, less one-directional, to name but a few features. The study continues with implications for theory and practice, including schools and next-generation aspiring leaders.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctor of Education)
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	26 Mar 2021 09:33
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 22:59
DOI:	10.17638/03115772
Supervisors:	Kop, Rita Qualter, Anne
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3115772