Characteristics and Daily Activities among University Presidents in Iran: Problems and Solutions

Leadership practices, beliefs and values of presidents play a great role in leading the universities, and academic organizations in general. Even though, organizational structures and usages of management technologies for improvement of leadership and management is considered vital, but studying leadership and management mechanisms without recognizing the nature of daily activities of university presidents will not help its improvement that much. The purpose of this research is to investigate the nature of presidential leadership in public universities affiliated with Ministry of Science, Research and Technology through their daily activities and opinions.In this study, the issue was investigated by using a characteristics and daily activities questionnaire and analysis of open ended questions. The research was based on data gathering from 35 university presidents. The survey method, content analysis, including data reduction and coding, were used to obtain a deeper understanding of the data collected throughout this investigation. Data analysis clearly showed that the nature of universities has made them bureaucrats for doing routing daily activities. At the end, some recommendations are given for improvement of leadership and management in higher education institutions in Iran.