Abstract:

Like many developing countries, Pakistan struggles with its higher education. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) encourages the private sector meeting the demand for higher education. But, there are large differences in public and private sector universities. This calls for a strong leadership.

Transformational leadership (TL) is a dominant leadership theory. Research shows that participative decision making (PDM) results in increased employee motivation, higher self-efficacy beliefs and job satisfaction. TL and PDM were hardly studied in Pakistan.

Hypothesis:
Transformational leadership and the level of participative decision making are associated with a significant positive increase in university teachers’ self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction in public and private universities of Pakistan.
A survey study was set up, involving university teachers from 2 private and 2 public universities (N 218).

Research instruments:
Transformational leadership inventory (TLI, Podsakoff et al., 1990), participative decision making (PDM; Leithwood and Jantzi, 1999) and intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI; Deci and Ryan (1985a). Building on Bandura (2006), a scale was developed for academic self-efficacy (SE). High reliability was observed: TL .94, PDM .85, SE .91, JS .89 and IM .76.

Linear regression analyses were carried out with TL and PDM as predictors and SE, JS and IM as dependent variables. TL and PDM explained a small proportion of variance. Two predictor variables JS F(2, 13.18); aR2 = 10%, = p < .05, and IM significantly account for F(2, 4.77); aR2 = 34%, = p < .05. The amount of variance explained by TL and PDM is rather small. Both predictors account for 10.1% of the variance in JS and 3.4% in IM. Our hypothesis cannot be completely accepted.

There are clear differences in explained variance between public and private universities. TL and PDM explain a higher proportion of variance in job satisfaction (32%; F (df=2)=17.41, p< 0.5) in private sector universities as compared to public universities (6.6%; F (df=2)=4.87, p< 0.5). Intrinsic motivation accounts for 6.1% variance (F (df=2)=4.46, p<.05) in transformational leadership and participative decision making variables in the public sector. However, self-efficacy hardly has an impact in both public and private sector universities.

In public sector universities a significant relationship is only found between PDM and job satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. A one unit increase in PDM results in an increase of .213 in JS and of .082 in IM. In the private sector, both transformational leadership (TL) and participative decision making (PDM) have an impact on job satisfaction. An increase of one unit in TL results in an increase of .394 in JS; an increase of one unit in PDM results in an increase of .216 in JS.

On the base of these analysis results, we can only partly accept our hypothesis.

Keywords:

Transformational Leadership, Participative Decision Making, Intrinsic Motivation, Self-Efficacy and Relationship.