Student Affairs Leadership ─ Defining the Role Through an Ecological Framework

Kuk and Banning offer readers a new lens for viewing leadership, one that goes beyond a focus on the behavior and values of leaders as individuals to examine how positional leaders interact with their environments to engage in leadership “in context”.

This book is addressed to aspiring and senior student affairs officers and offers a new “ecological” framework that recognizes that today’s leaders are affected by factors they may not control, and work within an environment they cannot expect to mold solely through their execution of skills and strategies.

Based on research supported through a grant from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) Foundation, this book explores leadership as an interactive process within varied environmental contexts, and though an analysis of the transactional process between the leader, the organizational members and the various components of the organizations environment.

It describes how leaders deploy differing competencies, skills and strategies in varied contexts, and how they choose to use past experiences, their training and personal characteristics to set priorities and navigate the cultural, social, physical, legal and political, resource, and ethical environments of their organizations.

Several chapters conclude with an account of how the experiences of the SSAO participants in the research informed their practice of leadership and understanding of how leadership actually works.