Abstract:

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the 21st century are experiencing major transformations worldwide, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. In Malaysia, not only developmental issues of HEIs at national and international levels are being debated, but it also includes policy and strategic planning issues such as those recently forwarded by the Education Blueprint of Malaysia (Higher Education) 2015-2025. Future global megatrends are also the main change forces that necessitate major transformations. As a result, university leaders must be equipped with necessary change-oriented capabilities for initiating, implementing and maintaining significant turnarounds. Therefore, in relation to this, it is pertinent that we study change-oriented thinking and behaviors of university leaders and managers. For this purpose and based on an extensive literature review focusing on change-oriented behaviors, we developed a change-oriented leadership scale consisting of six subscales: advocating change, envisioning change, encouraging innovation and having creativity, facilitating collective learning, risk taking, and scanning the external environment. However, analysis of survey data using Principal Component Analysis and Velicher’s MAP test revealed the emergence of five important components constructing change-oriented leadership behaviors scale in Malaysian academic settings: strategic environmental scanning, supporting organizational culture, thinking out of the box, having clear objective focus, and overcoming obstacles. The resulting Malaysian version of the scale demonstrated a strong evidence of quality issues of the analysis such as items with high loadings in each component, no cross-loading item and internal consistency of the emerged subscales.

Keywords:

Change-oriented behavior, Malaysian higher education institutions, scale development, academic leaders