Leadership in academic settings

Quantitative study

Descriptive data formal leadership roles

When participants were answering questions relating to leadership roles, they had to carefully consider their response. Firstly, participants were required to determine the relevance of the current leadership role. Subsequently, they had to assess whether the role was being fulfilled by formal leader/team members or not. Finally, if the role was deemed fulfilled, participants were asked to rate the quality of the leadership on a scale from 0 to 10. This resulted in three possible answering options for participants, with an example here for the peer leaders):

  1. This role is not relevant in the context of my team.
  2. This role is relevant, but is not shown by team members.
  3. One or more team members fulfill this role, and I rate the quality of their leadership.

To facilitate participant responses, we employed a multiple-choice system. An example of how this appeared on the Qualtrics platform is provided in the image below:

Relevance of formal leadership roles

In a similar manner to the peer leadership roles, the subsequent graphs depict the questionnaire responses, offering visual representations of the frequency of participants indicating that a leadership role was not relevant, relevant but not fulfilled by the formal leader, or relevant and fulfilled. The initial bar graph presents the overall results, while the subsequent four bar graphs represent the outcomes for each specific type of team, namely faculty/departmental/campus boards, POC-teams, research teams, and ATP-teams.


The external leader


The social leader


The conflict-resolution leader


The participative leader


The adaptive leader


The directive leader


The self-critical leader


The well-being leader


The team development leader


The task leader


The motivational leader


The empowering leader


The self-developing leader


The psychological safety leader


The team-oriented leader


The exemplary leader


    Perceived quality of formal leadership roles

    The subsequent graphs illustrate the average perceived quality of formal leadership roles. Error bars are incorporated to represent the standard deviations. These averages ranged from 5.8 to 6.9, measured on a scale from 0 to 10.

    The following graphs depict the average perceived quality of formal leadership roles for faculty/departmental/campus boards, POC-teams, research teams, and ATP-teams. Error bars are incorporated to represent the standard deviations.


    Relation between formal leadership roles


    This table represents the correlations between the different formal leadership roles. These findings show a moderate to high interconnectivity between formal leadership roles (with most correlations falling between .50 and .80).


    Latent profile analysis

    Next, we performed latent profile analyses using M-plus, in order to identify underlying latent profiles or distinct patterns of leadership behaviour. By conducting latent profile analyses, we aimed to identify potential distinct combinations or configurations of leadership roles that tend to co-occur together.