THE CREATION OF VALUE AT UNIVERSITIES FROM THE ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS IN LATIN AMERICA

The search of academic excellence is a key issue for Educational Institutions (Lord Brown Report 2010, OCDE, 2013) and it is also a theme that highly interest to citizens and policy makers worldwide (Horizon Report 2012, UE Education Report, 2012). Countries in emerging economies focus their economic efforts in education. They understand that by properly increasing the quality of their Upper Education Systems is the way to reach a good position in the international rankings and become more competitive. Ecuador is today in the process of improving their Upper Education System, and the government is doing an extra economic effort to reach this objective. The Good Living Practices described in their National Developing Plans for the period 2013-2017 in their objective 4 to reinforce the capabilities of citizens in objective 4.4 to improve the standards of quality and the process for accreditation and evaluation of all the educational levels. The challenge for this country is to reach excellence in their University System. For this challenge, a National Project has been started with the main objective of create a National Research Network to work in the diagnosis and improvement of the University systems in the country. The objective of this project consists of applying the relational coordination model to the teaching and learning processes at Universities in Ecuador to proof if those that are showing higher levels in relational coordination are the ones that are reaching best results in terms of teaching and learning results. According to this analysis and previous experiences, strengths and weaknesses in the coordination mechanisms will be also analyzed to promote actions to improve. As the researchers have shown in previous analysis, the application of coordination mechanisms in the internal work processes at Universities can improve final results and explain higher degrees of Academic Excellence (Brunner 2011; de Pablos-Heredero et al., 2012, 2013, García-Martínez et al., 2014). We have applied to a representative sample of 4600 lecturers and students of all the Universities in Ecuador a survey to measure it and in this paper we present the results.