Academic Leadership Inventory: Development and Validation in Indian Higher Education

India’s National Education Policy 2020 emphasises academic leadership as a key element of faculty development and institutional quality. However, validated instruments for assessing faculty academic leadership in Indian higher education remain limited. This study develops and validates the Academic Leadership Inventory (ALI), a context-specific measure of academic leadership among faculty in Indian higher education institutions. Following item generation through literature review and expert interviews, a 33-item instrument was pretested with 200 faculty members and examined using exploratory factor analysis. The revised 27 item instrument was validated using confirmatory factor analysis with data from 826 faculty members in IBM SPSS and AMOS 21.0. The findings supported a four-dimensional structure comprising Collegial Collaboration, Tutoring, Academic Proficiency, and Community Orientation. The ALI demonstrated satisfactory reliability and validity, offering a parsimonious instrument for assessing faculty academic leadership in Indian higher education contexts.