Understanding the postgraduate research student experience in a culture of collaborative leadership

Collaborative leadership is a relatively uncommon leadership practice, and not one that organisations necessarily have the structures to deal with. While there are different models of collaborative leadership, the common factor is that vision, values and responsibilities are shared, rather than responsibilities being divided among a team, or leadership coming from the top.

Project team: Ann Grand, Vic Pearson, Snezana Levic, Iain Greenlees and Joanna Shelton.

Our project has three aims:

1. First, to understand how people practise collaborative leadership and the implications of collaborative leadership for post-graduate students and their supervisory teams.
2. Second, to investigate how post-graduate students perceive collaborative academic leadership and its impacts on their experiences.
3. Finally, we will co-design scenarios that will look at ways the University could enhance the experience of future post-graduate research students supervised collaboratively by interdisciplinary teams.

We are focussing on post-graduate students because they are the future leaders of academia and industry. They will be the people who are tackling complex social problems and working with multiple communities each with their own values, experiences and expertise, which highlights the importance of understanding the qualities and implications of collaborative leadership.