Student-staff partnerships as counterforces to toxic leadership in higher education: insights from a South African university
通过访谈南非一所大学的十名教师和十名学生，研究学生-员工伙伴关系如何在毒性领导力环境中运作，发现其既可能挑战也可能强化现有权力关系，需嵌入共享治理和结构变革才能有效对抗毒性领导力。
This paper examines how student-staff partnerships (SSPs) may operate as counterforces to toxic leadership within a South African university. Drawing on qualitative interviews with ten academics and ten students, the study conceptualises toxic leadership as a systemic and relational phenomenon sustained through authoritarian governance, favouritism, emotional harm, and constrained agency. Informed by the Toxic Triangle framework, scholarship on SSPs, and decolonial perspectives, the analysis foregrounds how power, participation, and knowledge are negotiated within historically unequal institutional contexts. The findings show that SSPs are neither inherently democratic nor uniformly transformative. Rather, they emerge as contested and fragile practices that can both disrupt and reproduce existing power relations. In contexts marked by toxic leadership, partnerships often function as localised and contingent interventions, offering moments of voice, care, and epistemic recognition while remaining constrained by hierarchical and managerialist governance. When weakly institutionalised, SSPs risk symbolic inclusion without structural change; when reflexively supported, they can challenge deficit narratives, advance epistemic justice, and enable alternative forms of participation. The paper concludes that SSPs can counter toxic leadership only when embedded within broader commitments to shared governance, accountability, and structural transformation in higher education.