What Makes an Academic Leader Top of the Class?

Abstract

The increasingly data-driven research on leadership continues to explore the question of what constitutes effective leadership in the eyes of subordinates. One major challenge in this field lies in the limited availability of systematic and publicly accessible data on upward feedback. While prior research has extensively examined leadership effectiveness in private sector contexts – especially concerning CEOs – there remains a notable gap regarding top-level academic leadership, particularly university presidents. This study addresses that gap by analysing a unique and novel data source: publicly available ratings of German university presidents (rectors) submitted by their subordinate faculty members between 2009 and 2025 (N = 785). These ratings provide a rare, large-scale form of upward feedback and allow for an empirical investigation into the factors that shape perceptions of leadership effectiveness within higher education institutions. The analysis of possible determinants of the rectors' performance ratings operates on both the individual and organizational levels. On the individual level, we include detailed measures of the rectors’ specific human capital, such as the years of working experience, internal organizational experience, external promotions and prior higher education management experience. On the organizational level, we draw on a set of performance indicators, including third-party funding volumes, student data and university rankings. The empirical strategy relies on panel data models with ordered logit fixed effects estimations. Our preliminary findings strongly indicate that institutional research performance is among the most significant predictors of positive performance evaluations. These findings highlight the importance of aligning academic leadership with institutional performance goals and suggest that perceptions of effective leadership of academic staff are closely tied to quantifiable organizational success. By leveraging publicly available evaluation data and combining it with institutional performance metrics, this study contributes to a better understanding of leadership effectiveness in the academic sector and opens new avenues for empirical leadership research.