The paper explores the extent to which current ideas and perceptions about leadership and leadership development held by a sample of senior leaders and their teams in publicly-funded higher education organisations in England are shaped by national or global factors, values about public service and the increasingly marketised environment of UK higher education. The literature on globalisation and higher education has tended to focus on how globalising forces shape institutional policies on research and academic productivity, recruitment of international students, academic mobility across countries, programmes run abroad and the curriculum (Scott 1998; Kwiek 2001; de Groofe and Lauwers 2003; King 2004; Al-Youssef 2009). An alternative and more recent approach has concentrated on how global universities compete with each other, how world class status is perceived and achieved by leaders of universities and how league tables are helping to make successful higher education organisations across the world similar in their characteristics (Altbach and Balan 2007; King 2009; Salmi 2009; Stensaker and Kehm 2009). Less attention has been paid to the possible effects of globalisation on leadership of universities per se. Similarly, whether and how notions of public service, which might be either local or more universal, are still shaping leadership in higher education, has also been relatively little researched (Deem 2007b).