Educational Leadership Through the Lens of Crisis: Quest for Paradigm Shift From Classical to Transformative Leadership Approaches

Introduction

Globally, higher institutions of learning have been defined as hubs for knowledge, skills, learning, teaching, research, innovation, community development or service, and maturation. The attainment of this multilateral mission is anchored on the identification, articulation, and exhibition of defined shared ideals. Such shared ideals encompass ethics and morality, creativity and innovation, community service, ethical governance, partnerships, diversity, academic autonomy equity and inclusion, societal responsibility, and stewardship of institutional and donor resources among other shared ideals (Sutin & Jacob, 2016). Notwithstanding this noble role of higher institutions of learning in society, in the recent past, they have been caught in an ill-fated yet ever-increasing environment of crises thus the same universities have been turned into places of disorder, uncertainty, dejection, and dread. From the most recent COVID-19 pandemic to issues of climate change and student unrest these unfortunate circumstances ‘crises’ present both opportunities and challenges and demand for transformative leadership to explore novel, innovative, and transformative strategies to act as a buffer against the ever-evolving new crises.

Seeger and Ulmer (2001) remark that crises are high-impact happening and circumstances that frequently undermine the institution’s core operations and mission. Catastrophes naturally lead to interruption and have the probability of threatening any institution’s fundamental mandate, vision, and mission. Heath and Millar (2004) postulate that a crisis is classically described as an unexpected but foreseeable occurrence that has definite or possible effects on shareholders’ welfare as well as the repute of the institution affected by the catastrophe. Coombs (2015) stretches the concept further by defining a crisis as the discernment of an erratic occurrence that jeopardizes significant prospects of shareholders and might utterly affect an institution’s productivity and engender undesirable results. As per this description, the discernment of disaster by others is as vital emblematically as the catastrophe itself. Additionally, Pauchant and Mitroff’s (1992) effort to differentiate between crisis and incident creates the parameters of this specific study, where disasters are perceived to be interruptive to the whole institution, as opposed to a localized minor event. Catastrophes offer the opportunity for reflective moments for the leader and the followers in the organization.

In the wake of the 21^st century, tertiary and higher institutions of learning have been steering through a continuing and protracted myriad of political instability, high rates of inflation, across-the-board racial turbulence, and the current effect of global warming, COVID-19, and other new emerging challenges. Every of these challenges in one way or another destabilizes the normal operations of tertiary and higher institutions of learning and hence needs attention from those entrusted with management and leadership obligations in the respective institutions.

Several of these ill-fated happenings may be categorized as catastrophes, which Ulmer et al. (2018) describe as explicit, unanticipated, and out-of-routine occurrences or sequences of happenings that cause extreme heights of confusion and concurrently subject an institution to both threats and prospects to its high set priority in terms of objective. Notwithstanding the ‘unparalleled ‘crash of catastrophes emerging in these hard economic times, higher institutions of learning are not utterly new to these calamities. Several past occurrences have defined the manner in which researchers and academicians perceive and comprehend calamities in higher institutions of learning and this has influenced the approach tertiary and higher institutions of learning engage in preparation for ill-fated circumstances. Moreover, encounters with emergencies at the institutional, national, and international levels have made universities more responsive to the effects of catastrophes.