Abstract:

This article aims to describe the academic culture and leadership styles in Chilean higher education institutions with a focus on quality.

Transformational leadership is considering one of the main leadership styles that influence in performance.

Academic culture is a concept that has an increasing use in the last decade in higher education. Quality is a concept that lacks a standard definition that could be applicable in the field of higher education; for that reason and considering the literature review, we use a proxy about years of institutional accreditation.

A qualitative study is carried out through the use of semi-structured interviews, in nine higher education institutions. We discovered that the type of bureaucratic culture is the most predominant in universities. In the case of professional institutes, findings show that innovative culture exist in a higher level.

Furthermore, it is discovered that the transformational leadership style, as indicated by the literature review, is the one that predominates and is related to quality in higher education institutions.

Finally we conclude that strategies are required to know and promote organizational actions based on the predominant culture in higher education institutions to achieve quality in the academic work of these types of entities.

Keywords:

Culture, leadership, quality, higher education, tertiary education.