Digital Leadership in Higher Education Lags Behind Need

The University President Who Didn’t Know Her Own Job Description

In 2021, a mid-sized public university in the Midwest hired a new president. She had spent two decades rising through academic administration, had published on organizational change, and was considered a safe pair of hands. Within six months, her faculty were in open revolt. The cause wasn’t budget cuts or a scandal. It was email.

She had mandated that all department chairs respond to her messages within two hours, including evenings and weekends. She required weekly video check-ins with every dean. She installed a campus-wide Slack channel and then personally posted in it at 11 p.m., expecting replies. The faculty senate passed a vote of no confidence not in her leadership, but in her digital leadership. She was, by every traditional measure, a competent president. She was a disaster at the thing nobody had trained her to do.

That story is anecdotal. But a new systematic review suggests it is not an outlier. Jill Jameson, Nataliya L. Rumyantseva, Minjie Cai, and Marianne Markowski, researchers at the University of Greenwich and the University of Warwick, spent three years combing through every empirical study on digital leadership in higher education published between 1999 and 2022. They started with 231 records. After applying strict exclusion criteria, they landed on 36 studies that met their bar for empirical research (Jameson et al., 2022).

What they found is unsettling: the entire field of digital leadership in higher education is, by their assessment, "limited in theory, maturity, and evidence." The quality of most research is low. Definitions are all over the map. And the functional, how-to-do-it work is drowning out any critical thinking about whether the digital transformation of universities is actually working for the people inside them.

This is not a problem of technology. It is a problem of leadership. And it is getting worse as universities digitize faster than their leaders can think.

The 23 Year Gap Between Urgency and Understanding

The first study in their review appeared in 1999, when the internet was still a dial-up novelty. By 2010, only a handful of papers had been published. Then the pandemic hit. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of studies on digital leadership in higher education more than doubled.

That surge in interest is understandable. When COVID-19 forced every university in the world to move instruction online overnight, the question of who was leading that transformation became existential. But Jameson and her colleagues found that the research that emerged was, in their words, "lacking rigour in research questions and methods, rendering findings inconclusive" (Jameson et al., 2022).

This is a dangerous gap. Universities are spending billions on digital infrastructure, learning management systems, AI tutoring tools, and administrative platforms. But the people making decisions about these investments often have no empirical grounding for how digital leadership actually works in an academic context. They are flying blind.

The review found that most studies defined digital leadership in narrow, functional terms. It was about managing remote teams, adopting new software, or improving communication through digital tools. Very few studies asked the harder questions: How does digital leadership change power dynamics in a university? Does it centralize authority or distribute it? What happens to faculty autonomy when a president can monitor response times? What happens to academic freedom when digital systems track every decision?

These questions are not being asked. And the research that does exist is not mature enough to provide answers.

How They Did the Work: A Systematic Review That Actually Earns the Name

Jameson and her team followed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) and ENTREQ (Enhancing Transparency in Reporting the Synthesis of Qualitative Research) guidelines. These are the gold standards for systematic reviews. They are meant to prevent the kind of cherry picking or confirmation bias that plagues less rigorous literature reviews.

The researchers combined two synthesis methods. First, a descriptive synthesis that mapped the studies by year, country, methodology, and focus. Second, a textual narrative synthesis that looked for themes, patterns, and gaps in the actual findings of each study. This is a data based convergent synthesis design. It means they did not just count papers. They read them, coded them, and looked for what the studies actually claimed and how they supported those claims.

The 36 studies that survived the screening came from 16 countries. Most were from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. A few came from South Africa, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia. The majority used qualitative methods, usually case studies or interviews. Only a handful used quantitative surveys or mixed methods. None used experimental designs. None used longitudinal data.

This is a field that is still in its infancy, methodologically speaking. And the authors are honest about that. They call for "further research on theoretical definitions and digitalization to address gaps in the literature" (Jameson et al., 2022). That is academic code for: we do not really know what we are talking about yet.

The Four Problems That Keep Coming Up

1. Nobody Can Agree on What Digital Leadership Is

The review found that definitions of digital leadership in higher education "varied in scope and how far they are considered in the reviewed studies" (Jameson et al., 2022). Some studies defined it as e-leadership, which is basically leading teams that work remotely. Others defined it as digital transformation, which is about changing institutional structures through technology. Still others defined it as digital literacy, which is about individual competence with tools.

These are not the same thing. A provost who is excellent at Zoom meetings may have no idea how to lead a digital transformation of the curriculum. A CIO who can implement a new student information system may be terrible at building trust with faculty who are skeptical of the new platform. The field has not settled on a definition, which means every study is measuring something different.

2. The Research Is Functional, Not Critical

The authors found that "functional rather than critical perspectives predominate" (Jameson et al., 2022). This is a polite way of saying that most studies assume digital leadership is a good thing and then ask how to do it better. They do not ask whether it is the right thing to do in the first place, or for whom, or at what cost.

There is almost no research on the downsides of digital leadership in higher education. No studies on burnout from constant digital connectivity. No studies on the erosion of faculty governance when decisions are made through digital platforms that bypass traditional committees. No studies on the digital divide within universities, where some departments have the resources to adopt new tools and others do not.

This is a blind spot. And it is a dangerous one, because universities are complex organizations with multiple stakeholders who have competing interests. A leadership style that works for administrators may be toxic for faculty. A digital tool that improves efficiency for the registrar may undermine the autonomy of academic departments. The research has not grappled with these tensions.

3. The Quality Is Low

This is the most damning finding. The authors assessed the methodological quality of each study and found that most were "low, lacking rigour in research questions and methods" (Jameson et al., 2022). Sample sizes were small. Research questions were vague. Data analysis was thin. Many studies did not even define their terms.

This matters because universities are making high stakes decisions based on weak evidence. When a president reads a case study about how one university successfully implemented a digital leadership initiative, they may assume the findings are generalizable. They are not. The review makes clear that the evidence base is simply not strong enough to support confident recommendations.

4. The Field Is Not Maturing

Jameson and her colleagues propose a "digital leadership research maturity framework" to address these gaps. The framework has four levels: emerging, developing, maturing, and embedded. Based on their review, the field is stuck at the emerging level. Most studies are descriptive. They tell stories about what happened at one institution. They do not test hypotheses. They do not compare across institutions. They do not build theory.

The authors argue that the field needs to move toward more mature research designs. Longitudinal studies that track digital leadership over time. Comparative studies that look at different institutional types. Quantitative studies that measure outcomes. Mixed methods studies that combine the richness of qualitative data with the generalizability of quantitative data.

Without this maturation, the field will remain what it is now: a collection of anecdotes that cannot guide practice.

What the Research Does Not Prove (And Why That Is Interesting)

Let me be clear about what this review does not claim. It does not claim that digital leadership in higher education is impossible or ineffective. It does not claim that the 36 studies it reviewed are worthless. Some of them are quite good, and the authors acknowledge that.

What the review claims is that the field as a whole is not yet mature enough to produce reliable, generalizable knowledge. The evidence is too thin, too fragmented, and too methodologically weak to support strong conclusions.

This is actually an interesting finding. It means that the people who are writing books and giving keynote speeches about digital leadership in higher education are doing so without a solid empirical foundation. They are selling prescriptions based on personal experience, not research. That does not make them wrong. But it does mean that universities should be cautious about adopting their recommendations.

The review also does not address the question of whether digital leadership is fundamentally different from traditional leadership. Some scholars argue that it is not, that good leadership principles apply regardless of the medium. Others argue that the digital environment creates unique challenges that require new skills and mindsets. The evidence is not strong enough to settle this debate.

Why This Matters Right Now

Universities are in the middle of a digital transformation that was accelerated by the pandemic but will not slow down. Artificial intelligence is changing how students learn and how faculty teach. Data analytics are changing how universities make decisions. Remote and hybrid work are changing how academic departments operate. The question is not whether digital leadership matters. It is whether universities will invest in developing it, or whether they will continue to promote people who are good at traditional leadership and hope they figure out the digital part on their own.

The review suggests that the latter approach is unlikely to work. Digital leadership requires specific knowledge, skills, and mindsets that are not the same as traditional leadership. Universities need to define what they mean by digital leadership, develop training programs, and evaluate whether their leaders are actually effective in the digital domain.

They also need to fund the research that will tell them whether any of this is working. The review makes clear that the current evidence base is not adequate for the task. Universities cannot make informed decisions about digital leadership because the research has not caught up to the practice.

What This Actually Means

• ▸Stop treating digital leadership as a subset of traditional leadership. It has its own challenges, its own tensions, and its own failure modes. A leader who is excellent in person may be ineffective online, and vice versa. Universities need to assess and develop these skills separately.

• ▸Demand better evidence before adopting digital leadership models. If a consultant or a book promises a framework for digital leadership in higher education, ask for the research behind it. The review shows that most frameworks are based on thin evidence. Be skeptical.

• ▸Fund research that is rigorous, comparative, and longitudinal. The field needs more than case studies. It needs studies that compare different institutional types, track outcomes over time, and use valid measures. Universities that want to improve digital leadership should invest in the research that will tell them what works.

• ▸Ask the critical questions. Most research on digital leadership assumes it is a good thing. But who benefits? Who is left out? What are the unintended consequences? Universities need leaders who can ask these questions, not just implement the latest digital tool.

• ▸Train for digital leadership explicitly. Do not assume that a good department chair will be a good digital leader. Provide training on digital communication, digital decision making, and digital culture building. And evaluate whether that training actually changes behavior.

Jameson and her colleagues have done the field a service by showing how little we actually know. The next step is to do the work of finding out.