Leadership in changing doctoral education

Abstract

As a consequence of reforms in doctoral education, notably since the 2005 publication of the Salzburg Principles, doctoral schools represent the state of the art in contemporary doctoral education in Europe. They aim at supporting the collective vision and endeavour to ensure the personal and professional growth of doctoral candidates, the socialisation of doctoral candidates in the scientific community and their preparation for future careers in a knowledge society. But how is it possible that this new structure is not only perceived as an additional, perhaps dispensable bureaucratic layer that disrupts the traditionally very private relationship between supervisor and doctoral student, but is recognised by the latter as support and added value. We argue that this is directly related to the way the doctoral schools themselves are set up and governed. In this article, we use the example of the University of Vienna to illustrate how different leadership styles were used by the university management to ensure faculty buy-in. In particular, we point out that the mix of transactional leadership, which incentivises and rewards certain behaviours, and transformational leadership, which also encourages initiative and self-responsibility, has contributed to the fact that the doctoral schools at the University of Vienna, after only a short time in existence, are recognised as adding value; which has had an immediate positive impact on the situation of the students in particular, but also on the awareness of doctoral education in general.