THE INFLUENCE OF RELATIONAL COORDINATION IN THE POSITION OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE QUALITY RANKINGS AT ECUADOR

Countries in emerging economies focus their economic efforts in education. They understand that 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, more concretely in sub-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 prove 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 start actions to improve.

Therefore, the main objective of this research is to prove if the relational coordination (Gittell 2009, 2011) amongst different members at the University, lecturers, students and administrative staff explains excellence in the systems. Are the Universities best positioned in the rankings the ones showing higher levels in relational coordination at Ecuador?

To measure and encourage good coordination, the relational coordination is a very precise and helpful way. The relational coordination is based on the relationships at the people who are emotional beings. For that, the relational coordination attempts to group all the connections between them, not only just like a task, not just the tool or the technical need, but rather in real ways for make people work efficiently. The relational coordination is built at the side of work coordination, at all the aspects of the relationship. It recognizes, therefore, the need of the relational side of coordination to reach organizational effectiveness. The model is structured around two types of dimensions: communication and relationship.
We have applied to a representative sample of lecturers, students and Administrative staff to all the Universities in Ecuador a survey to measure it and in this paper we present the results.

This is the result of a project financed by the Education Ministry in Ecuador where a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the SENESCYT, the National Upper Education Secretary for Innovation and Technology in Ecuador. This is the Organisms responsible for promoting I+D+I policies in Ecuador.

The results of this Project will help to implement better organizational models in education and this way it will help to improve the creation of value of Universities in the country.