Educational Management and Leadership for First Time Leaders in Thai Higher Education
Faculty of Education, Suan Dusit University, Ratchasima Road, Bangkok, Thailand
ABSTRACT
Nowadays, there are many new leaders that have been promoted in higher education sectors worldwide, and many of them tend to be more young and inexperienced. In Thailand, in contrast to school leaders, many first time leaders in higher education have insufficient support such as leadership development programmes. Thus, some of them can adjust themselves to their new roles properly, whereas many are unable to do so. The common mistakes of first time leaders, for example, might comprise of failing to delegate, not providing feedback, failing to define goal, trying to change everything immediately and so on; these could be divided into two crucial aspects, including management style and leadership style. Firstly, their problematic management style, generally subjective model, could lead to being isolated. Secondly, their problematic leadership style, mainly emotional leadership, could possibly lead to unsuccessful results. Therefore, this article attempts to provide optional management models including: collegial models, systems models, and combined models; as well as an optional leadership style, distributed leadership, for the first time leaders. Moreover, according to the importance of interaction and communication in organization, complex responsive processes are also recommended for the new leaders in order to manipulate the conversation with their colleagues in the organizations.
KEYWORDS
Educational management, Educational leadership, Higher education, Thailand