Sustainability in higher education: the impact of transformational leadership on followers’ innovative outcomes A framework proposal

Higher Education Institutes (HEI) initiate, accelerate and facilitate regional and national development through human capital development, knowledge creation, innovation capacity building and technology transfer. As contemporary global challenges are of a mixed and multi-dimensional nature, interdisciplinary education and innovative research are needed more than ever. Thus, leaders of HEI are required to transform their institutions to respond to these challenges and the pressures created by global dynamics. This study is dedicated to designing a framework to enhance the relationship between the leadership styles and their followers’ innovative outputs. The suggested framework is based on the model of Kong et al. for leadership implicit follower theory (LIFT) and suggests the transformational leadership (TL) style to initiate the positive LIFT. This methodology proposes a set of indicators to assess innovation outputs quantitatively and intends to use engineering schools of HEIs as a sample to test the framework. It is suggested that this framework can be adjusted to examine different HEIs, colleges and R&D institutes in different contexts and at multiple leadership levels. The main outcome of this study is a framework that can be used to evaluate, assess and train existing or prospective HEI leaders, develop tailored human resources strategies, and design leadership training for students, researchers and young faculty members for their future career development in creative ventures.