The study is a new work concerning a sustainable leadership model in the fourth education revolution era, rapidly expanding technology that can empower employee work-related attitudes that enhance sustained competitiveness. The study retrieves a literature review within the research domains of competitive advantage, individual and organizational performance, knowledge resources, leadership attributes, and work-related attitudes. The study presents the leadership model, primarily the emergence of four leadership attributes: innovative, executive, effective, and adaptive within employees anticipate the three fundamental work-related attitudes: organizational commitment, career, and job satisfaction subsequently enhanced sustainable competitiveness. These intrinsic leadership values are powerful tools to adapt to the complex adaptive system, which is continuously and rapidly changing. The study concludes that staff acknowledge that leadership may be effective in “white-collar” and “blue-collar” positions.
TopIntroduction
The fourth education revolution, Education 4.0, is about innovation-based education and advanced learning skills that embrace massive educational transformation, focusing on intelligent and innovative technologies such as tablets and smartphones, bringing new eras and challenges in higher education. These changes have forced faculty to learn to reflect on significant technology trends and their application in learning and teaching. Despite this, higher education lacks understanding about its leadership values and growth mechanism of competitiveness in these rapidly expanding technologies and changing environment.
The emergence of intrinsic leadership values built-in employee belief system, hereafter, leadership attributes is essential to catalyze and sustain changes, heighten job performance and accomplish strong organizational performance (Karia and Asaari, 2019). The intrinsic values within leadership are the intelligence and innovation of knowledge resources that empower human civilization, the nation in the future, dynamic and new competitive environment. Despite becoming the most critical barrier for a digital or technoloy implementation, knowledge resources are acknowledged as the primary source of sustained competitive advantage in the digital and knowledge-based era (Karia, 2018a). Though leadership is essential for organizational performance, attributes of a successful leader in HEIs have not been explored in literature before (Karia and Asaari, 2019).
The future competitiveness of organizations leans on the emergence of intrinsic leadership values, especially in Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) that nurture human civilization. HEIs face new challenges related to Education 4.0, rankings, higher stakeholders' expectations, and financial sustainability crucial for Malaysian HEIs performance. Universities compete for research grants, innovative research, educational excellence, innovation-based teaching, advanced learning methodologies, employability, and community/industrial engagement. Meanwhile, faculty members should not only produce excellent research and publications but also publish in high-impact journals (e.g., Web of Science ISI Q1 & Q2). These are the recent cases causing employees' increased work-related stress (Villeneuve-Smith et al., 2008; Karia and Asaari, 2019).
Given such challenges and complexities faced by HEIs, it is substantial for the HEIs to preserve their human capital value and intelligence for job and organization performance and sustainable competitiveness in this new dynamic environment. HEIs should effectively capitalize their brilliant employees and protect them from increased work-related stress to conserve staff wellbeing, excellent performance, competitiveness, organizational happiness index, and mental health. HEIs should nurture academic employees, knowledgeable and talented, to deal with such pressures, challenges, and environmental changes. Therefore, it is significant for HEIs to understand how to harmonize their employees' work-related stress and attitudes to attain high-performing employees. The absence of knowledge on leadership complexities and attributes in HEIs and their effects allows this study to pursue the research for a deeper understanding. This raises the urgency of research correlating traits and attitudes and examines their full impact on performance in HEIs. Specifically, this study has not yet to analyze.
Consequently, this contemporary study, intrinsic leadership values acknowledge the new leadership model that can foster attitudes whereby previous scholars have been more concerned with the leader-follower linkage. Hence, they have neglected the importance of leadership attributes. The model helps HEIs and leaders/managers to understand why HEIs or organizations need to be aware of their employees' work-related attitudes toward employee work-life balance. Further, it promotes more positive attitudes and attains high-performing employees through leadership attributes, subsequently achieving high organizational performance.