La sociedad como laboratorio

Sweeney and Fry (2012:91-92) contend that leaders who, through their actions, demonstrate the possession of such universal values as honesty, integrity, courage, compassion and humility are likely to earn attributions of good character from their followers. Accordingly teachers were asked about what they perceived about their leaders’ values and behaviours. The objective was to explore the extent to which academic leaders are identified by VBL behaviours as perceived by the teachers. Hence, due attention is given to the followers’ perspectives because as Kouzes and Posner (2012:5) contend, “a complete picture of leadership can be developed only if you ask followers what they think of and admire in a leader.”

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As noted previously, the 36 items which were meant to assess VBL were grouped into five thematic areas. This categorisation was made on the basis of theoretical constructs. Validation of these values was based on nomination by their frequent citation in reputable journals and books. Moreover, a Cronbach’s Alpha of reliability test was used for both the entire items and for each value category. Moreover, inter-item correlation was also obtained in each case. The test results showed that all the sub-scales and the general scale used in this respect were found to be reliable (see table 4.2). It has been revealed that a Cronbach’s Alpha is above 0.8 in all cases implying that the measurement is reliable as partly explained by this test. Moreover, inter-item correlations are above 0.420 for humility and 0.446 for accountability implying the existence of a medium effect in each case. In the remaining three cases the coefficient is greater than 0.5 implying that there exists a large effect in each case. Accordingly, an investigation was made about teachers’ perceptions of their leaders’ values and behaviours.

From the investigation made it has been found that item mean scores range from a minimum of 3.156 for humility to a maximum of 3.38 for envisioning. Although there are slight differences among these values in terms of mean scores, in all cases values are concentrated around average scores. However, to examine whether there is a perceived fit or significant perceived gap in these values, the respondents’ ratings of the degree of importance of those values are used as test values. Perceived fit refers to the degree of congruence between employees’ values and their perceptions of leaders’ values (Lankau et al., 2007). As followers are able to recognise the alignment or gap between the leaders’ talks and deeds, asking followers about their perception of the leaders’ values has a strong potential to examine a given leadership. In accordance with this, Hannah et al. (2005) assert that the gap between leaders’ espoused values and actual behaviour are best recognised by followers.

Accordingly, a measure of significance for mean differences was made and the results showed that there are significant differences in all cases. The first category examined

was humility. The mean score obtained for humility was 18.94. A significance of the difference was made at a test value of 26.21. The test value in this case was the degree of importance of this value as rated by the respondents. Thus, a mean difference of -7.27 was obtained. This difference was found to be significant at a t-value of -17.94. A similar procedure was followed to examine mean differences for the remaining values. The second value category examined here is compassion. A mean score of 24.92 was obtained for this and a difference of significance was measured at a test value of 36.40. To this end, a mean difference of -11.48 was obtained which was found to be significant at a t-value of -19.69. The third category is integrity for which a mean difference of -6.90 was obtained, which was significant at a t-value of -17.74. The fourth and the fifth are accountability and envisioning respectively. To this end, a mean difference of -6.27 was obtained for accountability and a difference of -6.45 was obtained for envisioning. These differences were significant at a t-value of -8.70 and - 15.36 respectively. All these values were also aggregated. The mean obtained was 117.12 and the expected score as per the ratings of the respondents was 154.94. A mean difference of -37.81 was obtained which was significant at a t-value of -15.38. Therefore, it can be concluded from this quantitative investigation that there is a perceived gap in academic leadership in terms of demonstrating the VBL behaviours.

5.6 CHAPTER SUMMARY

This chapter dealt with the presentation and discussion of quantitative data which were obtained from the randomly selected teachers and students in the form of survey questionnaires. These data were presented in the form of tables and figures (in percentage, mean, aggregate mean, mean difference and standard deviation). For the sake of presentation of the frequencies, responses of the same direction were aggregated and the five point scale was reduced to a three point category. The presentation began by reporting about individual teachers’ perceptions of their collective capability to undertake educational initiatives to improve the students’ learning experiences. Following this, students’ perspectives were reported as they were also

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asked to rate what they feel about their own capability to learn and about their teachers’ educational initiatives.

Moreover, values of VBL were constructed and addressed to the respondent teachers for them to reflect upon. When presented to the respondents, the questions were grouped into two categories: level of importance and leaders’ perceived experience in demonstrating those behaviours. Teachers were asked to rate the extent to which the values (behaviours) of VBL were important to them and to rate the extent to which they perceived the academic leaders live by those behaviours. Finally, the gap between the two groups/categories was presented. By taking into account the data generated from the two measurement scales (VBL and CTE), a correlation was computed between the teachers’ perceptions of CTE and their perceptions of their leaders’ perceived lived experiences in terms of demonstrating the VBL behaviours. To this end, positive and strong coefficient of correlation was obtained between the two variables. At last discussion of the results of quantitative data was made.

CHAPTER SIX

ANALYSIS OF QUALITATIVE AND MIXED DATA SETS

6.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter contains two major sections in addition to this introductory section and the last section in which the chapter is summarised. The first major section is about the presentation and analysis of qualitative data set. This is about data obtained from teachers in the form of interviews and open-ended questions, and about data obtained from students and academic leaders in the form of interviews. This section, in turn, involves two sub-sections: The sets of behaviours amenable to institutionalise VBL at Ethiopian private universities (EPrUs); and the institutional contexts required to foster CTE through VBL. Thematic analysis is mainly followed in both cases and figures which are generated with the help of the software (Atlas.ti7) are also used along with verbal descriptions. When this software generates the figures, it also indicates in brackets the number of times a given theme is referred to and the number of other themes associated with a given theme. Therefore, the thematic analysis herein is supported by verbal descriptions about the themes and a figure that summarises the results about the theme.

The second major section of the chapter deals with triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data sets. In this section, the commonalities obtained between these two data sets are analysed. The mixed method is particularly required to triangulate quantitative data (teachers’ ratings about the relative importance of the universally endorsed behaviours of VBL) and qualitative data (themes defined from teachers’ descriptions about the sets of behaviours they wish to see). This triangulation is also extended to show teachers’ perception of their leaders’ behaviours as informed from the two data sets. Here, after the teachers’ ratings of their leaders’ performance against the values of VBL are summarised, relevant qualitative descriptions that go along with this

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quantitative data are also analysed. The analysis of this latter aspect of perception is particularly important to explain the role of VBL to foster CTE.