Redesigning Collegiate Leadership: Teams and Teamwork in Higher Education - Softcover

Bensimon, Prof Estela Mara Mara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080184956X ISBN 13: 9780801849565

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Most organizational theorists use the athletic team as a metaphor for the effective work group - specific players motivated to give their best performance in pursuit of a common goal. Redesigning Collegiate Leadership offers a different model, focusing instead on the complex ways that members of a leadership team interact, wield power, use language, and creat meaning. Estela Mara Bensimon and Anna Neumann describe the team as a culture and argue that effective team leadership depends on expecting, understanding, and appreciating the differences among individuals. Using interview with members of administrative teams on fifteen campuses - including research universities, public colleges, and community colleges - the authors examine teamwork as an essentially human activity.

About this title

About the Authors

Estela Mara Bensimon teaches at the Center for the Study of Higehr Education at Pennsylvania State University. She is co-director of the Organizational Structures and Policies Project for the National center for Postecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.

Anna Neumann is a professor of higher education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers in the American Research University.

From the Back Cover

Most organizational theorists use the athletic team as a metaphor for the effective work group - specific players motivated to give their best performance in pursuit of a common goal. Redesigning Collegiate Leadership offers a different model, focusing instead on the complex ways that members of a leadership team interact, wield power, use language, and create meaning. Estela Mara Bensimon and Anna Neumann describe the team as a culture and argue that effective team leadership depends on expecting, understanding, and appreciating the differences among individuals. Using interviews with members of administrative teams on fifteen campuses - including research universities, public colleges, private colleges, and community colleges - the authors examine teamwork as an essentially human activity. They consider how and why people on leadership teams think and act as they do, how they learn and communicate (or neglect to do so), and how they bring their deepest values, beliefs, and aspirations into play in the conduct of administrative work. Bensimon and Neumann offer a clear picture of how administrative leaders shape and maintain effective teams, and how the teams address diversity and conflict. Emphasizing the importance of inclusiveness, the authors also identify a number of hidden dynamics related to gender, race, and power inequity. Quotes from team participants make the book lively and accessible. Redesigning collegiate Leadership provides the basis - and the language - for understanding and discussing administrative leadership as a collective and collaborative process.

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080184956X
• ISBN 13: 9780801849565
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200