University in Changing Environment and University Employees’ Attitudes towards Ideal Leadership

Leadership styles have been the most important factor for HEI’s agility. Studies on educational leadership have grown significantly, but there are insufficient studies on faculty attitudes towards leadership. The purpose of this study is to explore in-depth knowledge and understandings of latent internal and external environmental factors that influence faculty attitudes towards ideal leadership. Data were collected from 1065 teaching and non-teaching staff working at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, most prestigious and largest science and engineering university in Mongolia. This research analyzed the data using thematic analysis. The result of thematic analysis suggests that HEI’s environment in Mongolia tends to be bureaucratic, highly politically motivated, and dysfunctional that create multiple barriers to running higher education institutes in market-oriented ways and hindering university agility to the changes in market and society. It is also evident that university employees dislike the current leadership and seem to have strong commitments to accept participative, transformational, and servant leaderships. This study contributes to the educational leadership literature by providing better understandings of the critical factors affecting faculty perceptions about the existing leadership and their attitudes towards ideal leadership.