After mergers, staff can experience that their leaders are “far away”. Yet, what does this “distance” really mean, and are there different conceptualisations of distance?
In a new article, Nicoline Frølich, Mari Elken and Thea Eide explore different concepts of leadership that emerge in such debates. They find that geographical distance is merely one form of distance and may also mask other forms of distance.
The article is available open-access at Higher Education Quarterly .
Article information:
Mergers, distance, and leadership: Perceptions of different forms of distance to leadership in merger processes
Nicoline Frølich, Mari Elken, Thea EideAbstract
Mergers in higher education are large-scale, complex organisational change processes seeking to integrate former independent institutions into a new organisational entity. Mergers are often justified by reference to broad overarching goals such as quality, relevance, and efficiency. In practice, mergers entail attempts at organisational integration which can be inhibited by several obstacles, increasing and large internal distances can be such a hindrance to integration. In this paper, we explore how different forms of distance to leadership in the context of higher education can be conceptualised, and how experiences of different forms of distance interrelate. This paper shows that geographical distance can also mask other conceptualisations of distances and that geographical distance can also interact with other forms of distances. The empirical basis consists of data from a large-scale research project addressing the organisational transformations taking place in Norwegian higher education due to mergers between 2016 and 2017.