Bewertung des Arabian Journal of Business and Management

Leadership Effectiveness in Higher Education Institutions: The IPA Approach

Abstract

Aschalew Degoma Durie

The purpose of this research is to examine the leadership effectiveness of leaders in higher education institutions in order to pinpoint possible areas of improvement. Leaders in this context refer to those who assume leadership role in the universities ranging from department head to university president. To approach the problem systematically, descriptive cross sectional research design was employed. About 120 questionnaires were distributed to those leaders from three public universities randomly selected and only 95 questionnaires qualified for analysis. The importance performance grid was used for data analysis and it was supplemented by paired sample t test to see whether the gap between importance and performance is statistically significant. Accordingly, about 28% of the works of the leaders is characterized by high importance and low performance and some 19% of the works is characterized by low importance and high performance. This implies that about 48% of the tasks of those leaders are not on their intended priority schedule. Hence, possible planning and differentiating the daily routines from the strategic works are required for the academic leaders in order to perform their activities based on their level of importance to their universities.