The Hybrid Role of Presidents in German Universities

An investigation of the role of university presidents in the context of inter-organisational competition is well advised to take into account the structural embeddedness of this position in the context of the university. The reason for this is that this embeddedness determines – at least to a certain extent – the presidents’ formal and informal power and, consequently, her room for maneuver in promoting the university’s competitiveness and actorhood. Based on insights from a research project that was conducted some years ago and from follow-up observations of the top echelon of German universities, the paper argues that there is a structural homology between the organizational design of the German university and the formal and informal structures of the president’s position. While an analysis of the organizational structures of the university (Luhmann 2008) reveals its character as a "multiple hybrid organization" – due to contradictions and frictions on all structural levels (Kleimann 2018) -, an investigation of the presidents’ role descriptions and leadership practices confirms that the university’s structural contradictions affect and shape the formal and informal structures of the presidential leadership position. Hence, the presidential role today is neither the historically established role of a primus inter pares nor that of a manager with the power to effectively steer the university in a top-down-manner. It rather is a hybrid composition of managerial and collegial elements. This applies to the role of university presidents in the context of inter-university competition as well. Even if the rhetoric of competition is ubiquitous, the presidents do not possess the power to force academics to engage in vying for third party funds and/or reputation. Due to the structural conditions of their role, they engage themselves and their university in competition by other means, e.g. by acting as role models and telling success stories, enabling competitiveness through seed funding, motivating staff to take part in competitions, establishing other universities as relevant contenders, initiating and organizing preparatory measures for upcoming competitions, and sensemaking in case of loss in a competition. This leads to the suspicion that the dichotomy of the two strong assumptions put forward in the call for contributions might be misleading. Neither the perspective of the university as a coherent organizational actor with a strong president at the top nor the idea of the university as a merely loosely coupled network of independent academic units and groups with a rather symbolic leadership figure at the top holds true for the German case. Instead, we should assume a continuum between both poles with the factual role of university presidents placed somewhere in the middle between them.