Digital Leadership in Higher Education

The issue “digital leadership” in higher education (he) is challenging in two ways: firstly, it is unclear whether we talk about the concepts of “digital leadership” or rather those of “leadership in the digital age”. secondly, it is an urgent topic: an increasing number of higher education institutions (heis) are involved in permanent change processes. this leads to their managers struggling to build and implement a coherent strategy for the institutions’ digital transformation processes that is also externally visible. despite managers occupying a key role for successful change processes, surprisingly we have little research on digital transformation processes in heis. whereas other research fields (e.g. management, military) can rely on a rich base of empirical research on the topic of leadership, there is a lack of research for “leadership in education”. furthermore, only a few attempts exist to date (and to the author’s knowledge) that aim at identifying the dimensions of (good) he-leadership in the light of the increasing digital pressure for change. the aim of this paper is to conduct a status quo analysis thereby undertaking a first attempt to provide a systematization of potential fields of action. heis should pay close attention to these fields to avoid switchi