IDENTIFYING THE FACTORS BUILDING PERSONAL, INTERPERSONAL, AND COGNITIVE CAPABILITIES IN MALAYSIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Leadership capabilities with their strong bonds with cognitive resources as well as emotional, contingent, and social intelligence of leaders, have grabbed the attention of scholars in the field of educational leadership. Recently a few studies have been undertaken focusing on these qualities using a common conceptual framework known as Academic Leadership Capability Framework. Five interconnected elements construct this framework including Personal, Interpersonal, and Cognitive capabilities as well as Generic and Role-specific competencies. Each of these dimensions has a few sub-constructs. With respect to Personal capabilities, three constructs including Self-regulation, Decisiveness and Commitment had been proposed to build this construct. Influencing and Empathizing were the two-sub-constructs to build Interpersonal capabilities and three sub-dimensions encompassing Diagnosis, Strategy, as well as Flexibility and Responsiveness were the three proposed elements under Cognitive capabilities dimension. The focus of the current study is on the capabilities that build Academic Leadership Capability Framework. In other words, this study aims to identify the main sub-constructs of capabilities dimensions building the framework from the perspective of Malaysian academic leaders. Academic leaders in this study refer to vice-chancellors, deputy vice chancellors, deans, directors, deputy deans, deputy directors, heads of departments and professors who do not have a formal position in the organizational charts of the universities. For this purpose, necessary permission was obtained to use the instrument that could provide measurements for the dimensions under the study. As the next step, the electronic version of the instrument was designed using Google Form application and was distributed among 585 academic leaders from 9 randomly selected public and private Malaysian universities. Ninety completed surveys were collected and analyzed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Velicer’s Minimum Average Partial (MAP) test to identify the latent variables within the data. The results revealed that “Making Decisions and Judgments” was the only construct to build Personal capabilities, “Sharing Information and Data” was the unique component building Interpersonal capabilities, and “Strategic Adaptive Thinking” as well as “Analyzing Problems and Alternatives” were the two constructs of Cognitive capabilities scales.