title: Distributed Leadership in University Quality Management: An Exploration in a Sino-Foreign Cooperative University in China
Creators: name: Fu, Jiaqi
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: Along with the rapid development of Transnational Higher Education (TNE) in China, the quality of TNE has become one of the most concerning problems in academia. Most current studies only emphasise how to meet the minimum quality standards required by the home and host quality assurance accreditation bodies rather than continuously improving educational quality. This leaves a significant research gap to fill. This thesis views quality management (QM) as having two folds meaning quality assurance (QA) and quality enhancement (QE). It needs both institutional and individual efforts from formal and informal leaders through their active participation in QM through leadership activities. This thesis aims to explore this issue in China's TNE by integrating Distributed Leadership (DL) and Professional Agency (PA) to address the knowledge gap in the literature. This study employs a single case study and selects a Sino-British University as the research site. Seven formal leaders and seven faculty were interviewed. Three types of data were collected: their lived experiences in their actions, collaborations, and change activities related to QA and QE; their individual characteristics and factors about their competence and readiness; and socio-cultural factors of the university, such as policies, power relations, and culture and values. This study explores their interplays and how they shape leadership activities at individual and organisational levels. Thematic analysis is applied to analyse the collected data in order to generate themes. The results confirm the proposed theoretical framework, which illustrates a prospective QM model in TNE through the lens of DL and PA. Both QA and QE exist at the University, but the leadership agency shows QE is central, which is exercised through formal and informal leaders’ PA in developing leadership capacity, forming a shared understanding of goals in enhancing the quality of education, fostering a change culture, and building trust. Nevertheless, the PA between the two groups of participants shows divergent characteristics regarding their identity, agentic actions and competence and readiness. Formal leaders' PA focuses on building a favourable climate for educational quality at the university by setting up working procedures, policies, and mechanisms to facilitate the improvement of work practices, professional learning, collaborations, and bottom-up changes. In contrast, the faculty's PA focused on leading pedagogical changes related to learning, teaching, and research. DL demonstrates multiple formats of DL in the processes of QM. The findings highlight a bi-directional flow of influence between formal leaders and informal leaders, which is mediated by trust. Based on the results, a model is developed to illustrate the leadership distribution manifested in managing the quality at the university. Four practical recommendations are made for the university to promote DL. It needs to: focus on organisational culture and value building, support formal leaders and faculty's identity and orientations, motivate faculty's competence and engagement, and provide a supportive structure. This study has enriched the existing knowledge about educational quality in the TNE context. It bridges a knowledge gap by examining how to engage staff members, particularly faculty, by fulfilling their personal and social development needs through DL and PA. Practically, this research is insightful for the existing and potential transnational projects worldwide by offering a reference on improving the quality of their education to sustain long-term organisational development.