Date

8-20-2026

Department

Graduate School of Business

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD)

Chair

James Thomas

Keywords

leadership transition, higher education, succession planning, institutional resilience, case study

Disciplines

Business

Abstract

This study addressed the limited understanding of how leadership transitions disrupt the people and systems that sustain a public higher education institution's ongoing operation. The purpose was to generate a grounded, comparative account of how a change in senior leadership transmits downward through an institution and of the conditions under which institutions mitigate or worsen its effects. A flexible multiple case study design within the post-positivist paradigm examined three pseudonymized Florida College System institutions that experienced structurally different transitions: an unplanned presidential departure filled externally, a planned provost retirement filled externally, and a planned presidential retirement filled through internal promotion. Data were collected from twenty-eight participants across five actor groups and analyzed through a two-cycle hybrid coding workflow guided by four conceptual constructs and six theoretical frameworks. Across cases, every transition showed slowed interim decision-making and a uniform engagement signature in which confidence in senior leadership declined while mission-based and colleague-based engagement held steady. The key result was a single principle: transition impact scales with an institution's dependence on the departing leader and is moderated by stable structures that do not depend on that leader. The study concluded that an institution's strength during a transition resides less in the leader who arrives than in the people and structures that remain.

Download

Included in

Business Commons

Share

COinS