Abstract
Ph.D. (Education Leadership and Management)
This thesis explores academics and academic heads of departments’ (HODs) experiences and understanding of the leadership of performance management as enacted by HODs. Following the transformational mandate of higher education in South Africa, higher education institutions (HEIs) have had to demonstrate measurable accountability. Hence performance management was introduced to manage academic staff performance in line with institutional visions and strategic goals as aligned to broader national political goals. This thesis responds to criticisms that the implementation of performance management in HEIs represents a new form of governance that undermines academics’ professional authority in determining the meaning of quality of teaching and research. Of significance is the critique that performance management is a technology of power used as a surveillance tool that serves to control academics and eventually engender self-disciplinary behaviours that subjugate academics’ subjectivity. Within the execution of performance management, HODs are hierarchically positioned to ensure the performance of the rest of the academics. The performance of HEIs is largely dependent on their leadership of the process. Drawing upon the notions of panopticism, governmentality and the dynamic of power-resistance, and using critical performativity as an analytical framework for the study, I adopted a critical social constructionist approach in my case study of academics in South Africa. The study reveals three predominant accounts of critical leadership, namely, conscious leadership, deliberated leadership and resistance leadership. I argue that the interconnectedness of these leadership accounts shaped how academics and HODs made meaning of critical leadership perspectives for HODs in their leadership of performance management. In the South University context, leadership as invited, demanded or authorised by academics, pertains more to HODs creating a humane, harmonious environment where leadership is relational and effected through the continuum of leader-colleague or colleague-colleague and a neutralised power...