The relationship of business school performance to deans' self-perceived leadership styles in Taiwan (China)

With the concern of improving higher education in Taiwan, governmental assessments served as an important indicator of school quality influencing a school's development. In addition, improving school quality depends partly on the role of leadership. This study examined the relationship of business school performance to deans' self-perceived leadership styles in Taiwan.; This study found that business school deans perceived themselves as dominantly transformational leaders resulting from MLQ scores. The findings of this study determined that there was no experimentally important and experimentally consistent predictability of governmental ratings by using deans' self-perceived leadership styles as predictor variables. Among six domains comprising the governmental ratings, the study found that five domains, faculty quality, instructional quality, productivity of faculty research, administrative support and general impression of the assessment committee, were favorably rated under Laissez-faire leadership style than transactional and transformational leadership styles. This study also found that the rating domain of general impression of the assessment committee was positively correlated to small student to teacher ratios. Overall this study concluded that the leadership style most favorably associated with the apparent criteria produced by the governmental ratings is a mixture of laissez-faire, transactional, and transformational leadership styles in that order of importance, which indicates that there was a mismatch between the practice of leadership and individual perceptions of it.; Based upon the findings in this research, the study recommends that (a) educational leaders in Taiwan should continue to develop and promote transformational leadership styles; (b) the Chinese version of MLQ used in this study is a valid means of gathering data; (c) the Ministry of Education in Taiwan may consider re-examining assessing school performance and valuing characteristics of transformational leadership; (d) the Ministry of Education may consider assisting educational institutions to build up a strong sense of successful school leadership; and (e) serving as the exemplary model of leadership characteristics desired at all levels.