Faculty's academic intellectual leadership within the conditions of modern universities

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the displayed level of faculty's academic intellectual leadership behaviors, and the differences according to their personal, professional, and institutional features, by controlling the impact of having managerial duties. For this purpose, quantitative data were collected from 1398 Turkish faculty using the Academic Intellectual Leadership Scale. The data were then analyzed using descriptive and covariance analyses. Descriptive analysis showed that the general level of the faculty's intellectual leadership behaviors was at a "Sometimes" level, while at a "Often" level in Mentor and Guardian dimensions. Moreover, the covariance analyses, by eliminating the impact of having managerial duties, showed that there were significant differences in the faculty's intellectual leadership in terms of their gender, seniority, academic title, discipline, and universities' establishment dates. These differences may arise from the willingness of the female members of the faculty to academic contributions, potentially larger scholarly productions of professors during their longer careers, the subjectivity of the research results in social sciences, and the well-rounded institutional facilities in the most of older universities to support academic activities. Therefore, in order to minimize the differences among faculty's intellectual leadership, university managers can adopt several practices such as providing larger travel funds for younger academics, creating inducement project opportunities early in the careers of the faculty, commissioning younger faculty with administrative duties and encouraging faculty from product-oriented disciplines to participate debates and activities related to social affairs as well as instituting essential academic support mechanisms.