A Look at the Challenges of Boundary-Spanner Academic Leaders

The present study was an exploratory sequential mixed method approach, so the qualitative section of the study was done by descriptive phenomenology method. The participants in the qualitative section included academic administrators with managerial experience who by criterion sampling and saturation in the research findings, 12 were selected for the interview. Research tools in the section were semi-structured interviews and the data analysis was by thematic analysis. In order to get assured of the validity of the data in the section, member-checking was employed. The findings of the qualitative section showed that the challenges of boundary-spanner academic leaders can be categorized into three main categories: individual, organizations, and environment. In the second section of the study; given that the purpose was to validate the main and sub-themes of the qualitative section, so a quantitative survey strategy was used. To collect quantitative data, a researcher-designed questionnaire was applied consisting of 15 questions on a five-point Likert scale and including individual, organizational and environmental challenges. The reliability of the questionnaire was calculated Cronbach's alpha coefficient and was obtained for individual (0.813), organizational (0.861), and environmental (0.771) challenges.  For the data analysis, a One-sample t-test and Friedman test were used in SPSS16 software. The results of the section showed that considering that, the mean of individual challenge (4.25), organizational challenge (4.45), and environmental challenge (4.25) was higher than the theoretical mean (3); Therefore, from the perspective of academic administrators and leaders, the score of all dimensions of the challenges was above theoretical mean and based on the value of t at the level (p =0.01), the results were significant. So, each of the discovered dimensions in the qualitative section was highly agreed upon by the participants in the study. Also, the prioritization of the challenges was included, respectively, organizational, individual, and environmental challenges.