Abstract

This paper focuses on deans’ self-perceptions and faculty perspectives on leadership in Kazakhstani higher education. Amendments to the Law of Education (2018) in Kazakhstan formally granted universities greater authority over academic, financial, and managerial decision-making. These reforms have significantly reshaped the leadership role of deans, shifting them from a predominantly centralized and administratively controlled position to the one that combines academic leadership with managerial, entrepreneurial, and externally oriented responsibilities. Consequently, the leadership practices of deans have become increasingly managerial and complex (Patton, 2021; Seale & Cross, 2016). The focus of this research is 1) to investigate how deans conceptualize and practice leadership within their respective institutional settings; 2) to investigate the challenges they encounter as a result of the ongoing reforms and how they respond to them; 3) to identify similarities and differences in deans’ perceptions and practices and challenges across two institutions; and 4) to explore faculty perceptions of deans’ leadership approaches and culture in their organizations. The research context included two different Kazakhstani universities (public and private), which recently expanded their autonomy, with document analysis and interviews with deans and faculty as the two main data collection tools. The sampling includes 24 participants in total. The findings reveal that deans in both universities generally express optimism about governance reforms and report adopting more transformative and distributed leadership approaches. However, many also acknowledge the need to balance democratic practices with authoritarian decision-making in response to faculty resistance, administrative burdens, and resource constraints. Faculty perceptions diverge sharply by institutional type. In the public university, faculty largely describe leadership as democratic, inclusive, and supportive, emphasizing participation in decision-making and institutional stability. In contrast, faculty in the private university frequently characterize leadership as opaque, unfair, and insufficiently participatory, pointing to tensions between formal autonomy and internal governance practices. These contrasting perceptions suggest that, despite policy-level declarations of autonomy, its practical realization remains uneven, often formal rather than substantive.