Institutions of Higher Education (HE) are subject to rapid and radical changes. Faced with rising socio-political demands, globalization and digitization of HE, public sector austerity, and conflicting strategic goals, HE leadership has become extremely challenging. In the wake of the fiscal crisis in 2008, top-level executive leaders in public HE are put under severe pressure to implement neo-classical cost-saving strategies that are alien to the traditional values of European academia. Consequently, HE institutions are moving away from traditional public value-oriented principles of collegial and value-oriented HE management (Public Value Orientation) toward a marketized, competition- and performance-oriented view on HE (New Public Management).

While the negative effects of this latent paradigm shift on academic staff is well researched, there is hardly any evidence on how top-level executives perceive and cope with this phenomenon. This master thesis closes this research gap by investigating whether HE leaders in Europe to-date are mainly driven by NPM-related values, it explores how prevalent politicized NPM-related value trade-offs are in the operative processes of HE leadership, and it reveals the detrimental consequences of the paradigm shift for European HE. Using an explorative and iterative mixed-methods approach, this thesis, first, derives research questions based on a systematic review of the scientific discourse on HE leadership and NPM to, second, conduct exploratory quantitative analyses on data of a unique survey conducted in 21 European countries with N = 7,312 top-level public sector executives, n = 631 of which are actively involved in (higher) education.

Results show that the paradigm shift toward marketized HE has created substantial conflict between the traditional values, identities, and goals of HE leaders and institutions by enforcing hierarchy, politicization, and a dysfunctional pressure toward short-term oriented criteria of economic productivity. NPM escalates the power of political stakeholders on HE who demand the implementation of policy reforms that are essentially obstructive to collaborative and innovative research and teaching HE leaders struggle severely to meet those ever-growing and value-incongruent demands without alienating themselves and their organizations from their core mission and the traditional values of academia.