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Academic managerial competency in Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia: validity and factorial invariance of an Australian Scale in the Malaysian context

SN Social Sciences volume 1, Article number: 271 (2021) Cite this article

Abstract

This study’s focus is on validating the second-order three-factor Australian academic managerial competency scale in the Malaysian academic context as well as checking its factorial invariance based on academic leaders’ gender. Furthermore, we performed a descriptive comparison between three samples of academic leaders from Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia based on the validated model. For this purpose, we analyzed the data of 367 academic leaders from 25 Malaysian public and private universities. Upon completion of data screening, we applied the robust Satorra–Bentler method, through which a corrected Chi-square statistic and robust standard errors were generated, to estimate the model’s parameters and compute fit indices using EQS 6.4. We practically addressed the importance of the data's multivariate normality as an essential requirement of the analysis. We achieved this by comparing the selected estimates’ standard errors and z statistics based on the robust maximum likelihood (ML) and conventional ML methods. Our results confirmed the factorial validity of the second-order three-factor Australian academic managerial competency scale in the Malaysian academic context. The validated scale exhibited a high level of factorial invariance based on gender. Moreover, the descriptive comparison showed that the items of the validated model were more important from the sampled Malaysian academic leaders’ perspective than from their Australian and New Zealander counterparts. We thereby contribute to research on management competencies in higher education, provide policy implications, and recommend avenues for future research.

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Data availability

Our dataset to estimate the final model was published on Harvard Dataverse and is accessible via https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5IPOS3.

Notes

  1. The scale has been developed with the support of the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. However, this scale does not necessarily represent the views of the above-mentioned government office.

  2. Δ S–B χ2 is not χ2-distributed. To compute this statistic, we followed the guidelines by Bentler (2006, pp. 157–158).

  3. For further information, see https://asem-education.org/initiatives/31-eu-share-project-higher-education-in-asean-region/ and https://rihed.seameo.org/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Professor Geoff Scott, from the University of Western Sydney, and Natalie Laifer, from the office of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC), for the permission to employ the academic managerial competency scale in this study.

Funding

This study is not a funded research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Higher Education Research Institute (IPPTN), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang, Malaysia

    Majid Ghasemy & Hazri Jamil

  2. School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang, Malaysia

    Nordin Abdul Razak

  3. Institute of Human Resource Management and Organizations (HRMO), Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Am Schwarzenberg-Campus 4(D), 21073, Hamburg, Germany

    Lena Frömbling

Authors
  1. Majid Ghasemy
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  2. Hazri Jamil
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  3. Nordin Abdul Razak
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  4. Lena Frömbling
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Correspondence to Majid Ghasemy.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest of any kind related to this article.

Ethical approval

The performed procedures were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments, or comparable ethical standards. No consent was required, since the participation was voluntary, information was anonymized, and the paper does not include images that may identify the person.

Appendix

Appendix

Appendix A1: Item correlations based on the final model (N = 367)

Item Correlations
LT1 1.000          
LT2 0.683 1.000         
LT5 0.559 0.651 1.000        
LT6 0.753 0.697 0.548 1.000       
SELF_O2 0.429 0.436 0.403 0.410 1.000      
SELF_O3 0.461 0.430 0.354 0.395 0.411 1.000     
SELF_O4 0.515 0.395 0.369 0.399 0.437 0.622 1.000    
U_OP1 0.490 0.447 0.387 0.509 0.418 0.339 0.475 1.000   
U_OP3 0.486 0.493 0.401 0.525 0.519 0.382 0.486 0.596 1.000  
U_OP4 0.554 0.547 0.508 0.568 0.438 0.493 0.532 0.567 0.560 1.000

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Ghasemy, M., Jamil, H., Abdul Razak, N. et al. Academic managerial competency in Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia: validity and factorial invariance of an Australian Scale in the Malaysian context. SN Soc Sci 1, 271 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00283-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00283-7

Keywords

  • Academic managerial competency scale
  • Malaysian higher education
  • Academic leadership capability framework
  • Satorra–Bentler robust methodology
  • Australia
  • New Zealand