A comparison of department chair tasks in Australia and the United States

Virtually every managerial book written lists and expounds upon the tasks, duties, roles and responsibilities of administrators. This paper reports a portion of the findings of the third phase of a study of Australian and U.S. academic department chairs in colleges and universities. In it, we seek to clarify how chairs in the two countries define the tasks that exemplify their role as chair. The driving question behind this inquiry is: Do academic department chairs, independent of country, define their tasks in the same way? And, if so, how might universities in both countries benefit from this knowledge?