THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONAL COORDINATION IN FINAL TEACHING AND LEARNING RESULTS AT UNIVERSITIES

Today the search of academic excellence is a key issue for Educational Institutions and it is also a theme that highly interest to citizens and policy makers worldwide. The application of relational coordination mechanisms in the internal work processes at Universities can improve final results and explain higher degrees of Academic Excellence.

Communication seems not to be the problem in the European Educative systems and concretely in Spain, where some barriers are being removed. The interchange of information by making use of direct tutorials and the application of technologies for the academic supervision of students is a reality.

We start this research by identifying the elements that are taking part in the change of the educational system in the last ten years, we go deeply in the technologies, the political reforms on the study plans at the European level and the need to implement internal systems that guarantee the life cycle at Universities.

The main question in the analysis consists in trying to answer how the changes are affecting the internal structure of the centers and in particular, of the academic departments and the cooperation amongst them if, apart of evaluating, they are evaluated.

Therefore, the main objective of this research is to proof if the relational coordination amongst team members at the University departments explains excellence in the upper education Spanish system.

We are going to survey to academics, students and administrative profiles coming from two different Public Universities, the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid and the Cordoba University in Cordoba. It is interesting to assure that the model does not make a difference for geographical or socioeconomic reasons.

We understand the research has interest for Universities and policy makers. In Universities vocation and sense of responsibility are highly important, but we find lack in some other aspects that are best explained in terms of relational coordination.
Teaching and learning processes count on with the typical characteristics of service activities, where rules and procedures are important. This vision in processes demands the establishing of education objectives that must be properly defined. The vision in processes obliges to establish some educative objectives, for each level of the teaching and learning process and establish the index to measure final results.

The relational coordination model can be of interest to reach good results in organizations or organizational processes where high levels of task interdependence (Thompson, 1967), uncertainty (Argote, 1982) and time restrictions (Adler et al., 1999) are required. This circumstance takes place in Upper Education Systems.

In this research we show that the relational coordination model can help to create a proper organizational climate to reach quality and effectiveness in the University System. Results show that these different dimensions of the relational coordination model: mutual respect, the sharing of goals and knowledge explain best results at Universities.