Decision-Making

Decision-making in higher education refers to the ways in which plans of action are formulated and implemented within institutions of higher education. This often occurs at multiple organizational levels. Institutions of higher education, though bureaucratic in form, hold a unique organizational structure among modern organizations. Shared governance, which promotes participatory and distributed leadership, is a widely employed method of decision-making in higher education. In contrast to the traditional top-down hierarchical model of governance employed by most modern corporate and state-run organizations, shared governance allows for an interaction of decision-making at a variety of levels. While there is a prevalence of shared governance in colleges and universities, the distribution of decision-making varies widely between higher education institutions by the types and numbers of individuals involved in ...