Towards Leading Adaptable Colleges: A Description of the Potential for Experimentation in Three British Columbia Colleges
Date
2019-07-24
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Abstract
In this research, three British Columbia colleges were studied to understand how executive teams led innovation and enabled or failed to enable experimentation in an economic climate of decreasing funding. By creating a description of these teams, the author then concludes about the generative adaptive capacity of the colleges in the context of a challenging economic environment. Each college was described and interpreted as a separate case, and the researcher presents an integrated framework from an analysis of the findings and relevant literature on leading high capacity institutions. The most relevant literature for a study of this context was found to be complexity theory. Here, the author uses a new conceptual frame applied to describe and to interpret organizational culture and leadership approaches. The research found that none of the cases studied provide strong evidence of an executive team succeeding in creating adaptation through innovation via novel experimentation. As a consequence, the author developed a new conceptual model and presents implications to help guide executives to meet the challenges related to organization adaptability when they face change in the future.
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Keywords
adaption, complexity, college, experimentation, leadership, innovation
Citation
Donaldson, B. W. (2019). Towards Leading Adaptable Colleges: A Description of the Potential for Experimentation in Three British Columbia Colleges (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.