Collaborative and Operational Leadership (COLead): Leading from all levels toward research excellence and sustainability

About This Grant

The Collaborative and Operational Leadership (COLead) project aims to increase the participation of faculty from teaching-intensive institutions (TIIs) in the national research enterprise. Distinct from research-intensive institutions which often have divisions devoted to research (i.e. an Office of Research) and/or senior administrators (i.e. a Vice President of Research) solely dedicated to advancing research activity, research leadership at TIIs is often led by an administrator with multiple duties such as a Provost or Vice Provost. This fragmentation of duties, combined with limited resources to create and support a research environment, may result in lower research productivity among faculty at TIIs. This project addresses this absence of dedicated research leadership through a collaborative leadership model led by the institution’s office of research and sponsored projects (or equivalent) and a guiding body of campus leaders. To increase the participation of faculty from teaching-intensive institutions (TIIs) in the nation’s research enterprise, the goal of COLead is to build capacity and research support infrastructure using a replicable, systematic approach guided by collaborative leadership. The project includes three aims: Aim 1 – Build institutional capacity using a structural collaborative leadership model that provides sustained infrastructure for strategic research and sponsored project leadership, resulting in increased capacity for developing, maintaining, and executing a strategic vision for research; Aim 2 – Driven by the collaborative leadership model, increase the capacity of faculty and staff and streamline processes for research development and grant management through a coordinated and sustainable procedural research infrastructure model; and Aim 3 - Build a systematic, replicable approach based upon the collaborative leadership and research infrastructure model, resulting in an organizational change toolkit that TIIs can use to grow and sustain research and research development by leveraging existing resources. The toolkit will be tested and iteratively refined in partnership with two peer institutions. The proposed collaborative leadership model will be informed by institutional external assessments, peer research, selected peer advisors, and guided by a faculty with expertise in organizational change, teaming, and strategic planning. The model will be documented in the toolkit and disseminated widely through national networks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.