Betwixt and between: A narrative inquiry into Chinese university leaders’ intercultural competence in leadership

Critical leadership studies in HE

Leadership is defined as an influencing process in which an individual exerts intentional influence over others to structure activities and relationships in a group or organisation (Yukl, 2002). In HE, academic credibility, experience of university life and the ability to communicate and negotiate with others are crucial for effective leadership (Spendlove, 2007). Although leadership is an ambiguous and contested concept across institutional, historical and cultural contexts (Grint, 2005; Juntrasook, 2014), previous mainstream studies have understood university leadership to be anchored in a functionalist paradigm with three facets – teaching, scientific research and social service. Since leadership is distributed across different working areas in universities, leadership practices for university leaders include four main foci: setting directions, developing other academics, redesigning organisations and managing instructional programmes (Bolden et al., 2008; Xing, 2019). However, this functionalist paradigm of leadership has been criticised for ignoring personal sense-making and work contexts.

Critical leadership studies perceive leadership as individuals’ constructions of themselves and of their world, informed and shaped by organisational and sociocultural meanings and perspectives (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2012), as well as an ongoing communicative process that produces leader–follower categories, identities and relationships (Tourish, 2014). In other words, leadership is not an external, knowable entity but rather a product of social construction (Eacott, 2017) and thus can be deconstructed and reconstructed by those in leadership positions and by the people they lead (Fairhurst and Grant, 2010).

Critical leadership studies draw upon an interdisciplinary pool of theoretical resources to investigate educational leadership and search for a deeper understanding of phenomena instead of employing quick, short fixes to address complex problems (Niesche, 2018). Three approaches to conducting critical leadership studies have emerged: The first approach is social-constructionist, which conceptualises leadership as ‘a fluid process emerging from the communicatively constituted interactions of myriad organisational actors’ (Tourish, 2014: 80), as well as ‘a phenomenon produced and sustained in interactions, a situated and relational phenomenon’ (Crevani, 2018: 84). In this vein, leadership co-creates relationships and manifests in interactions amongst people (Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012), providing or creating direction in the organising process, thereby adding a spatial dimension to leadership (Crevani, 2018). The purpose of leadership is to create a space in which possible meanings can be negotiated and navigated (Kelly, 2014). The second approach is relationist, which conceptualises leadership as ‘a socio-material configuration of social, material, and discursive relations (connections, practices and routines) in everyday management that results in the recognition and attribution of direction and influence as leadership’ (Wolfram Cox and Hassard, 2018: 533). This approach positions leadership as an ordinary and everyday activity (Wolfram Cox and Hassard, 2018) and promotes the general leadership-as-practice movement (Raelin, 2016), a more specific foundation in socio-material relationism. The last approach is ‘leadership-as-practice’, which ‘look[s] for leadership in everyday activities’ as ‘a process of co-creation’ (Raelin, 2020: 1). This approach can bring us closer to the lived reality of what people who practise leadership do, shedding new light on underlying forces and dynamics and revealing those tacit processes that contribute to leadership (Raelin, 2020).

Critical leadership studies suggest that university leadership is inconstant, as it constantly changes and transforms in account of the interactions of leaders with others and in different contexts. Leadership perceived in this light is embedded in the field of interactive relations when specific events occur, and it relates to how leaders perceive and practise leadership. Applying this understanding in the context of HE not only means exploring how university leaders practice their leadership in different work domains, but also investigating how they draw meaning from their leadership and from their roles as university leaders through incidental events.

In this article, we regard the development of the leadership of university leaders through overseas leadership development programmes as a formational trajectory. We identify leadership as a fluid influencing process based on university leaders’ experiences and critical self-reflections, which effectively revealed their intercultural experiences of overseas leadership development programmes.

The intercultural competence of educators

Culture is a complex and dynamic concept. In the current globalised era, there is no solid cultural ‘box’ to help us construct our cross-cultural human interactions (Dervin and Gross, 2016). An intercultural setting is not only a context or condition for human existence, but also an aim for co-living. In the case of university leaders, the intercultural experience of overseas leadership development cultivates their intercultural competence as an unexpected component of their leadership.

Intercultural competence refers to ‘one's ability, dispositions and behaviour to successfully function, negotiate and navigate across cultural contexts, build and sustain positive cross-cultural interactions and relationships with others, and more importantly, in their professional responsibilities, effectively service individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds’ (Ukpokodu, 2011: 437). Byram’s (2009) research claimed that intercultural competence consists of five elements: knowledge, attitudes, interpreting and relating skills, discovery and interaction skills, and critical cultural awareness. For Ladson-Billings (2001), interculturally competent educators were not only cognisant of their own culture but were also intimately aware of the cultures of the students with whom they interacted. Such educators develop consciousness and ‘knowledge of the larger socio-political context of the school, community, nation, and world’ (Ladson-Billings, 2001: 98).

For our research, it was important to understand what this meant for university leaders as cross-cultural leaders participating in overseas leadership development programmes. In a sense, university leaders engage in ‘cultural brokerage’, mediating ‘cultural incompatibilities’ to build ‘bridges across cultures’ (Gay, 1999: 235). Their overseas leadership development experiences affected Chinese university leaders’ intercultural competence, which was then embedded in their construction of leadership. Focusing on intercultural competence as a major change in leadership style, our research aimed to unravel the details of the participant university leaders’ experiences of overseas leadership development programmes and to investigate how intercultural situations influenced their leadership.

Methodological rationale

According to Clandinin and Connelly (2000: 20), narrative inquiry is a way of understanding experience through ‘a collaboration between researchers and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus’. This method of inquiry emulates the fluidity of temporality, spatiality and sociality, all of which constitute the three-dimensional space of narrative (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990). Its aim is not to tell exotic stories. Rather, ‘the priority is to compose research texts that [animate] the lives of participants’ (Clandinin and Murphy, 2009: 600) and to prioritise the participants’ narrative authority (Craig and Olson, 2002). Participants’ experiences are embedded in social circumstances that are ‘puzzling, intractable, [and] no longer amenable to existing theoretical frameworks and social discourse’ (Connelly et al., 2003: 366). Consequently, the narratives generated by narrative inquiry carry a different kind of weight from the data produced by quantitative forms of investigation.

This article unpacks three Chinese university leaders’ experiences of overseas leadership development programmes from the subjects’ perspectives. The participants’ fine-grained narratives provided us with an intimate insight into their perceptions of these programmes and enabled us to examine their intercultural learning, along with the impact of this learning on their leadership in the era of internationalisation. Hence, our analysis incorporates narrative accounts in multi-layered ways (see Olson, 2000). First, the participants in our study lived and told, then relived and retold their stories. Second, our interpretations of these stories operate across the three dimensions of narrative space, namely, temporality, spatiality and sociality.

Data collection

Diverse data were collected in order to construct a comprehensive landscape of narrative inquiry into the experiences of three Chinese university leaders (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). We obtained our data from a series of in-depth interviews, from the participants’ reflective reports and from official documents, such as news items and policies published on the universities’ websites. Through triangulation, the data met the trustworthiness criteria in narrative inquiry (Lyons and LaBoskey, 2002).

Interviewing Chinese university leaders proved to be a challenging task for us as young researchers. The challenges include gaining access to them (Mikecz, 2012) and building trust with them (Thuesen, 2011). To overcome these challenges, gatekeepers were critical for establishing initial contact with the participants; for instance, the administrators in the international office at the Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education kindly wrote official letters to get permission to conduct the research at University A and University C. Also, an official research request letter from the president's office at Author 2's former university was sent to University B. These official letters from gatekeepers greatly facilitated the data collection.

From April to June 2018, Author 2 conducted interviews with the three participants at their universities in Shaanxi. Each interview lasted between 40 and 60 min according to the interview schedules (see Appendix). Prior to each interview, Author 2 introduced himself, the research project, and the related ethics in a professional manner and requested permission to record the interview. All participants agreed to the recording and signed written consent forms. The interviews were held in the interviewees’ offices, and there were no interruptions during the interviews. Despite the interviewer and interviewee having never met each other, the interview atmosphere was relaxed. All participants welcomed the research and arranged sufficient time and assistance for the interviews. After his interview, Vice-Chairperson Lin kindly arranged for Author 2's transportation to another university for data collection, and Vice-Chairperson Wang lent his learning materials (i.e. a published book and collected works) to Author 2 for further study. These gestures indicated that a good rapport had been forged between the researcher and the participants.

The participants also shared with us their reflective reports, prepared during and after the overseas leadership development programmes. Additionally, Vice-Chairperson Wang shared with us a simplified personal diary as Supplementary Information. Referring to data from the interviews, Author 2 searched on the websites of the participants’ universities for follow-up news about the overseas leadership development programmes. The triangulation of these data verified and/or supplemented various aspects of the data, which contributed to the richness of the research material. This article focuses on both interviews and reflective reports. All the data were stored securely, and only the authors could access them. Pseudonyms were used for all participants and their universities.

Data analysis

According to the narrative inquiry methodology, the three analytical tools of broadening, storying and restorying, and burrowing (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Connelly and Clandinin, 1990) were employed to support the scope of the research.

First, we used broadening to ponder China's HE system and the challenges of HE internationalisation for university leaders. We introduced the participants and researchers to provide the background of our inquiry. Second, we adopted storying (i.e. telling the participants’ lived experiences) and restorying (i.e. reconstructing the participants’ experience alongside the societal and historical stories) to examine the three university vice chairpersons’ overseas leadership development experiences and to highlight the situations they experienced through participation in the overseas leadership development programmes. Regarding burrowing (the third research lens), we considered the three participants’ leadership development through the overseas leadership development programmes and their personal interpretations of themselves as university leaders. We then explored significant shifts in their thinking about what an ideal university and HE system in China would look like. The three analytical strategies were combined to understand the participants’ narrative accounts across time and space.

The programmes

China aims to build a more innovative and equal HE system by learning from developed countries, and overseas leadership development programmes were thus introduced as part of a national strategy – the Revitalisation Plan for HE in the Central and Western Regions of China (2012–2020) (China's Ministry of Education, 2013). The overseas leadership development programmes were sponsored by the Hong Kong Pei Hua Education Foundation and the Lee Shau Kee Foundation but were organised by the National Academy of Education Administration and the China Education Association for International Exchange, administered by China's Ministry of Education. The duration of all programmes was 31 days, including 7 days of pre-exchange leadership development in China, 21 days of overseas leadership development and 3 days of post-exchange leadership development in China. Both the pre- and post-exchange leadership development took place at the National Academy of Education Administration in Beijing. The three Chinese university leaders in this article participated in overseas leadership development programmes in three different countries – the US, the UK and Canada. We encountered them after the leadership development programmes provided the narrative foundations of this article.

The participants

Three university leaders voluntarily participated in the research. They shared commonalities in terms of their affiliations, roles, duties and leadership development experiences. Firstly, they represented similar provincial universities in Shaanxi (a province situated in western China), which were administered by the Shaanxi Provincial Education Department. Secondly, they were all vice chairpersons in charge of student affairs at their universities. Thirdly, it was their first attendance on an overseas leadership development programme that led to their salient and transformative learning achievements. Finally, they were all active learners who were keen to learn from other cultures. The above commonalities created resonance in their storytelling.

Nevertheless, the countries they visited and the respective leadership development themes varied. We use pseudonyms in this article to protect the participants’ privacy and introduce their personal details as follows. Mr Zhao was a vice-chairperson at University A, who attended a US leadership development programme on the theme of student-centred teaching service systems in 2013. The programme was organised by the China Education Association for International Exchange and included 22 participants. Zhao had served as a vice-chairperson for 2 years before the programme, and it was his first visit to the US. The second participant, Mr Wang, who was a vice-chairperson at University B, attended a UK leadership development programme on the theme of university research and development in 2016. The programme was organised by the National Academy of Education Administration and included 23 participants. He had served as a vice-chairperson for over a year prior to the programme, and it was his first visit to the UK. Finally, Mr Lin, a vice-chairperson at University C, attended a leadership development programme in Canada on the theme of university teaching and personnel leadership development in 2017. The programme was organised by the National Academy of Education Administration and included 22 participants. Lin had been a vice-chairperson for two years prior to the programme, and it was his first visit to Canada. Overall, the diverse leadership development themes from 2013 to 2017 provided nuanced comparability across the three participants’ stories.

The researchers

Narrative inquiry involves a co-composition of storying and restorying between participants and researchers (Clandinin, 2013). During the process, narrative inquirers become part of the landscape of the stories. Meanwhile, our own research backgrounds and experiences guided our encounters with the participants and helped us unravel their nuanced stories based on relational understanding.

Author 1 of this article is an associate professor of education at a Chinese university. He has been studying the North American narrative inquiry methodology (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) since 2012 and has applied it to research university teachers’ narratives. This research experience fostered his methodological belief that human learning and development take place in real life through incidental events (Wei, 2019, 2021). Meanwhile, his experiences as a visiting scholar in Europe (including Finland, Germany and Russia) enabled him to probe the issue of the internationalisation of education and strengthened his reflections on the intercultural dialogue in HE.

Author 2 of this article is a lecturer in education at a Chinese university. He has a decade of experience studying the impact of overseas leadership development programmes on Chinese school principals and university leaders. Both his master's and doctoral theses concerned this topic. Moreover, he had 6 years’ experience working as a coordinator of similar overseas leadership development programmes at his former university, which enabled him to understand the complexity of such programmes and appreciate the richness of the participants’ experiences.

Finally, both of the authors were from Shaanxi, like the participants, and consequently understood the local context and the participants’ accents. Author 2 collected the raw data and storied the participants’ experiences, while Author 1, as a narrative inquirer, reorganised the storylines and identified theoretical insights by applying broadening and burrowing to the extensive narrative accounts. The authors’ identities as both insiders and outsiders of overseas leadership development programmes, and our mutually critical analytical perspectives, added to the richness and robustness of this article.

‘Students are potential investors’: Mr Zhao's story

Zhao was the vice-chairperson of a financial university, who visited the US in 2013. The topic of his post-leadership development reflective report was ‘building a student-centred teaching service system’. During the interview, Zhao storied his visiting experience as follows:

I was employed to chair student affairs at this university in 2011. Two years later, I had a chance to participate in this [overseas leadership development] programme. It was a pleasant experience. I remember it was 21 days, from late October to mid-November 2013. We visited lots of places in the United States, including George Mason University, the University of North Texas, and others (2 April 2018).

Zhao regarded the overseas leadership development programme as a bridge connecting his prior and future work experiences. Before the overseas programme, he had administered student affairs at the university for two years. He regarded this programme as ‘appropriate [for him]’ because he was seeking an opportunity to learn something new and incorporate it into his practice. During the interview, Zhao shared his gains from this programme:

The major achievement [for me] has been promoting student-centred ideas at the university. Students should be encouraged to engage in university governance. We use the jargon ‘student management’. Should students be managed? This idea is totally wrong. In China, although we respect teachers’ authority, students should have equal status with teachers in modern times (2 April 2018).

Visiting US universities transformed Zhao's ideas about teacher–student relationships at the university. From the perspective of a university leader, he considered the unsustainability of the government's funding of the university, using ‘students as potential investors’ as a metaphor for a novel connectedness between teachers and students. Based on this future-oriented perspective, Zhao adopted a new approach to supporting student-centred service, not only transforming his views and ideas about the university but also initiating some reforms. In his reflective report, he wrote the following:

The institution and methods should be constructed systematically. The student assessment policy was reformed to place more emphasis on students’ learning – not only their academic learning, but also their service learning through extracurricular activities. Tutoring is also a means for students to communicate with teachers at least once every semester. We set a reward system for tutors who make time to mentor students (2 April 2018).

Visiting and observing US universities enabled Zhao to identify the deficiencies of his university under China's HE system. He mentioned issues regarding the governance of HE institutes in China. In terms of changing the situation at his university, Zhao expressed a belief that this was something ‘unconsciously influenced’:

If we use the phrase ‘student-centred’ in university regulations, I suppose that nobody would notice it. It would be useless. So, this is a problem of people's epistemic views. It is something unconsciously influencing the university (2 April 2018).

Visiting US universities transformed Zhao's perspective on university governance. Students, as subjects of a university, need a more supportive system to construct themselves as autonomous individuals. Zhao used the word ‘autonomy’ repeatedly in his interview, highlighting it as another key factor in university reform and student development. This intercultural learning opportunity helped him reflect on the weaknesses of his university and pursue a future-oriented direction. Interestingly, Zhao emphasised that China's education system is centralised and dominated by top-down unified leadership, whereas US education is decentralised and led by the market from the bottom up. Zhao's recognition of both the advantages and disadvantages of the Chinese and US education systems raised his awareness of ‘interculturality’ (Dervin, 2016) and reciprocal learning in HE internationalisation (Dervin et al., 2020). A similar phenomenon appeared in Mr Wang's narrative exemplars, as shown in the next section.

‘University culture matters’: Mr Wang's story

A vice-chairperson at an engineering university, Wang visited the UK from October to November 2016. In his reflective report, he discussed in particular the culture of the university and the importance of cultivating a humanistic approach, and in his interview, he remarked:

From the point of view of the university, it is critically important that teachers have an enthusiasm for education, students, and their work. However, Chinese teachers are more interested in their scientific research [than in educating students], because publication is related to their titles and promotion. So how can they truly embody a love of education, a love for students, and devote themselves to teaching and cultivating talent? (27 June 2018).

Wang's questioning arose from his observations in the UK. He noticed that students and academics at King's College London exhibited ‘sunny optimism’, and life at British universities appeared dramatically different from that in China. In his interview, Wang spoke of how, despite the policy of accountability and ‘publish or perish’, his understanding of the aims of the university towards student development had changed.

The most important thing for university teachers is to cultivate talent. Cultivating talent does not mean that a course is organised well but that you teach with your heart. Then, you are a leader, a teacher, and a model for students in your speech, behaviour, and thinking. University teachers should both teach and educate young people. It is not enough to just teach! (27 June 2018).

In terms of nurturing young students, he continued:

I believe that the level of reading defines the status of a nation. A university without reading has no real education, but a city full of books is the people's spiritual home. In fact, I think the most important thing is to cultivate students’ reading and learning abilities. Our students sometimes don't read – even some teachers don't read. I think that's incredible! (27 June 2018).

The overseas visit enabled Wang to develop a critical perspective on China's HE system and the micro-practices at his university. In his interview, he repeatedly referred to the ‘culture’ of the university and asserted that transforming the university culture was his main goal as vice-chairperson:

It's an issue of culture. It's the inner thing of [the university] itself. I feel deeply that the lowest level of leadership is managing people, the second level is systematic negotiation, and the third level is cultural reconstruction. My university is now operating at the second level – evaluating colleges and academics. The system for evaluating professional titles is perfect, but you can't see much of a culture (27 June 2018).

Wang's interpretation of leadership is worth probing. He divided university leaders’ leadership into three levels, from the lowest to the highest, designating ‘culture’ as a vital component of the leadership role. The overseas leadership development programme pushed Wang out of his accustomed zone of working. He noticed the latent but critical element of world-class universities – namely, their atmosphere and culture of cultivating people.

Seeming impressed, he sighed with emotion and said:

When you walk around British university campuses, you feel the culture! Many things seem to operate naturally. Students love learning, and teachers love teaching. A teacher who has that kind of noble personality not only teaches but also educates people. Culture is like the air you can't see or touch but need. I think it is crucial to construct an advanced culture at the university. Once the culture is formed, it will be amazing! (27 June 2018).

Wang, influenced by this overseas experience, tried to organise activities to help students understand the university culture. He incorporated his learning from the UK into his university and included some indigenous ideas and practices. We found examples of this on the university website, where Wang promoted a ‘scholarly campus’ and used the metaphor of the ‘fragrance of books’ to describe his expectation that students would read, due to his belief that reading is vital for cultivating a humanistic approach in Chinese traditions (Lee, 2000). He also introduced practices to enlighten students at his university, such as sports meetings, entrepreneurship competitions, and accommodation changes (e.g. college-based dormitories). Wang's prompt introduction of foreign educational ideas and his ability to transform them into local practices revealed his intercultural competence as a university leader.

Telling China's HE stories: Mr Lin's story

A vice-chairperson at a technology university, Lin attended an overseas leadership development programme in Canada in November 2017. It was his first overseas visit and a ‘really an eye-opening visit’ for him. He used the metaphor of ‘Granny Liu Entering Grand View Garden’ ³ to describe his introduction to Canada. However, his initial observations did not identify a disparity between China and Canada. At the beginning of the interview, Lin said:

There is almost no disparity between China and Canada. I realised that China has made great progress in recent decades. The city's infrastructure in Toronto, for example, is not better than that in Xi’an (3 April 2018).

Lin's accounts revealed a particular perspective on intercultural competence. ‘Hybridised cultural understanding’ (Dervin and Gross, 2016: 5) is vital for university leaders when they communicate with people from other cultures, and Lin's reflective report emphasised the mission of ‘telling China's HE stories’ to international colleagues:

Canadian teachers and students don't know much about China, nor about the current situation in China's HE system. Their impressions of China and its HE are outdated. I suggest strengthening China's educational openness in various effective ways. We need to tell Chinese stories, especially about the achievements of China's HE in recent years, to attract foreign teachers and students to accept exchanges and study in China (3 April 2018).

Having confidence and responsibility as a Chinese university leader, Lin shared his hope that more overseas colleagues would recognise China's HE system and its progress following a policy of reform and opening up. Nevertheless, in his interview, he admitted that the HE system in Canada is still more advanced than that in China.

Although most universities in Canada are public in nature, they have greater autonomy than Chinese public universities. In Canada, the government gives financial support to universities but exerts very little control (3 April 2018).

Chinese universities’ lack of autonomy stems from the specific cultural background, social systems, and developmental processes of China's HE system. According to Lin, analysing and judging the practices of HE governance in Western countries objectively and dialectically will allow China to learn from the best practices and experiences that are suitable for the country's national conditions.

Lin connected his reflections with the opening up of China's HE under the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015. He referred to Chinese–foreign cooperatively-run universities as a new trend in China, but the foundation of cooperation is idea-level reciprocal learning, which also relates to synchronised intercultural competence. Lin acknowledged this in his interview:

Changing our ideas is the most important task for universities in central and western China. We should rethink what to learn and how to learn from Western countries. Meanwhile, we should not forget the Chinese national situation, such as our social regime. Intercultural learning needs institutional change, and the government needs to do this (3 April 2018).

The above reflection reveals the political dimension of intercultural exchange in education (Dervin, 2016). Lin's observation reminds us that we should fully recognise the achievements of China's HE in recent years. He claimed that the gap between China and Western countries in HE is constantly narrowing. The overseas leadership development programme enhanced his confidence in promoting socialist HE with Chinese characteristics. Lin's narrative examples revealed the growth of his intercultural competence via his attitude towards and critical views on foreign cultures (Byram, 2009). Moreover, his dialectical and reciprocal stance on international educational exchange became a novel element of his leadership as a university leader.

Leadership as a personal and contextual construction process

The three university vice chairpersons’ narrative accounts showed that their experiences in Western countries enhanced their understanding of university governance. From a functionalist perspective, the leadership of university leaders covers only their main tasks (Knight, 2004; Yukl, 2002), but as Bolden et al. (2008) and (Xing 2019) have argued, setting directions, developing faculties, redesigning organisations and managing instructional programmes are the major leadership responsibilities of university leaders. Nevertheless, our research found that leadership was not a priori identified or distributed in the leaders’ existing jobs or working areas (Sewerin and Holmberg, 2017) but was constructed through incidental events and experiences (Juntrasook, 2014). In this research, the overseas leadership development programme as an intercultural activity mediated the university leaders’ reflections on their existing tasks and added a key dimension to their perceived leadership roles.

From the perspective of critical leadership studies, HE leadership is an ongoing constructive process in an intercultural and ontologically relativist context (Evans, 2022). Our findings aligned with those of Wolfram Cox and Hassard (2018), who found that the leadership of university leaders is situation-specific according to time, location, and culture. Therefore, we included an intercultural dimension to go beyond a unicultural context (Crevani, 2018; Eacott, 2017). Our findings, based on the three university leaders’ interviews, show that leadership depends on diverse cultural constellations of micro-interpersonal and macro-intercultural relationships based on meso-programmes.

Regarding changes in the participants’ leadership styles, the overseas leadership development programmes altered their fixed assumptions (Mezirow, 2003) about China's HE system. For example, Mr Zhao acknowledged that universities should be student-centred, and in the era of internationalisation, it is necessary to borrow advanced ideas and reconstruct Chinese universities accordingly. Similarly, Mr Wang was aware that university culture is of primary importance and highlighted the implicit nature of HE governance. He also proposed detailed practices to construct a scholarly atmosphere on a university campus, such as organising reading clubs and appraising teachers’ scholarships of teaching. An interesting finding was that Mr Lin's first overseas visit challenged his assumptions about developed countries. He realised that China had progressed and achieved the same infrastructure that he observed in Canada, leading him to increase his expectations of Chinese universities. Lin also mentioned that autonomy is important for university academics. Overall, the overseas leadership development programmes gave all three vice-chairpersons new perceptions of leadership, implying that an intercultural dimension was a critical consideration regarding the leadership of university leaders.

Intercultural competence as a key dimension of university leaders’ leadership

In a previous study, an overseas leadership development programme provided an opportunity for one to critically examine the differences and similarities between two HE systems and to reflect upon their leadership practices and institutional procedures (Wang, 2014). In this article, we claim that intercultural exchange gives leadership a new conceptualised dimension. Turner (1987) has described the existence of a ‘liminal space’ in which cultural systems are constructed. Cultural hybridity can emerge from such a liminal space, where different understandings of leadership overlap. Our research found that the formation of leadership occurred in the liminal space between different cultures; however, the investigated Chinese university leaders found a doctrine of meaning between the leadership practices observed at home and abroad. These middle-ground perceptions and choices thus exposed the intercultural dimension of leadership. Therefore, in China, recognising intercultural competence as a key dimension of university leaders’ leadership is something novel. Such a dimension is brought about by the overseas leadership development programmes presented in our research.

This article aligns with Byram’s (2009, 2011) categorisation of intercultural competence in that the overseas leadership development programmes have enabled university leaders to obtain knowledge, attitudes, skills, and critical awareness of interculturality. We note that Byram (2009) used the term ‘intercultural competence’ not only to refer to intercultural awareness in order to appreciate otherness, but also to refer to potential actions that lead to self-improvement. In a nutshell, the goal of the overseas leadership development programmes is not to borrow the best practices, as different practices are set in different historical, cultural and political contexts, but to achieve a deeper understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of one HE system by comparing it with another HE system (Liu, 2021). A deeper understanding of the Chinese HE system becomes a foundation for future innovations of the three university leaders with their self-determined agenda.

In the context of globalising HE, the participants in our research refused to treat others as ‘cultural dupes’, incapable of interpreting, accommodating, and resisting dominant discourses. The relations between East and West are complex, multidimensional and ‘involve processes of negotiation of cultural messages, even if this occurs in spaces characterised by asymmetrical power relations’ (Rizvi et al., 2006: 256). The overseas leadership development experiences enhanced Chinese university leaders’ intercultural competence, their understanding of China's HE system in general, and their views on institutional practices at their own universities. The article suggests that considered and careful leadership of internationalisation that preserves distinctiveness and promotes equality between cultures is in the long-term interests of universities, offering both individual and societal benefits (Lumby and Foskett, 2016).