Organization, Information, and Human Capital: Troika Requisites for HEI Leadership and Organization Performance

Servant Leadership And Organization, Infor, And Human Capitals Troika Requisites For Organizational Performance

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) pride themselves on their Education Excellence (EE) pursuits for stakeholders’ benefits particularly students, parents, governing entities, and society. The EE is aimed at developing and building future leaders and practitioners as conscientious citizens for the betterment of society. These lofty ideals need to balance the diversity of stakeholders’ needs and the perennial lack of funding for its accomplishments. This inadvertently forces public and private HEIs to opt for different sources of funding like philanthropy grants, sponsorships, or expanding its lucrative product/service offers. Balancing HEIs stakeholders’ needs and funding issues unintentionally advocated the use of modern economic and management models designed for business enterprises to be riveted into the mainstream HEIs management, not only for break-even or profits but also to uphold their EE pursuits.

For the HEIs to balance their lofty EE aspirations and to maintain financial sustainability, the bottom line is that the institutions must perform. This calls for managing HEIs’ performance holistically and in totality. In pursuance of EE and institutional performance, HEIs seeking accreditation or ranking is underscored by its Quality Assurance and Accreditation (QAA) system reflecting key institutional/programmatic performance indicators and measures (George et al., 2019) spanning (a) leadership &governance (Knies, et al., 2016), (b) teaching, learning and research (TLR) & quality assurances, (c) infrastructure, human & financial management and (d) its societal responsibilities (Harrison & Freeman, 1999). These call for Organizational Performance Management (OPM) to feature highly in HEIs strategic and operational management, and are normally measured by its economic performance of financial and market outcomes of its strategic and operational performance indices (Hubbard, 2009; Luo et al., 2012; Jenatabadi, 2015).

The need of OPM (Uyargil, 2013; Ritala et al., 2015) and organizational performance embrace charismatic leadership behavior and leadership effectiveness (Yang, 2016; Knies et al., 2016; Frackenpohl et al., 2016), creativity and innovation (Ritala et al., 2015), continuous improvement competence, employee creativity (Yang, et al, 2016), knowledge sharing within the individual (Teixeira, 2018) and the organization. These managerial necessities including QAA protocols/practices, academic rankings educational aspirations, processes/results performances management have been multifariously discoursed/researched broadly but albeit holistically as HEIs “sum-of-total rather than some-of-parts” OPM.

Sahadat and Fariha (2016) described leadership as learned values and attitudes whereby performance is considered the outcome of all organizational cumulative efforts. They discussed various leadership types and traits as related to Performance Excellence Management (PEM) and evaluation mechanisms, rather than the in-depth assessment methodologies used to evaluate EE per se. Shamia, et al. (2018) demonstrated that the Asian Knowledge PEM Model’s four university processes dimensions of Knowledge Management (KM), leadership, personnel, and outputs are valid measures affecting EE. The MBNQA as validated by Badri, et al. (2006) also demonstrated that leadership is a driver for the 5 processes criteria of measurement, analysis, and knowledge management, strategic planning, faculty and staff focus, and process management, that re-affirms the strategic fit of MBNQA for education by Winn and Cameron (1998). This notable research into leadership and PEMs show that MBNQA, from which the Strategic Performance Management System (SPMS) used in this chapter is adapted, is a valid PEM for EE.