A proposal of an action agenda for Rahabhat Universities organizational culture development towards performance excellence as higher education institutions for local development
Abstract:
The purposes of this study were to survey Rajabhat Universities' Organizational Culture to obtain a profile of each university and as a general profile of all universities, to compare their organizational culture with the Baldrige Criteria for performance excellence, and to propose an action agenda to develop Rajabhat Universities' organizational culture towards performance excellence as higher education institutions for local development. The subjects of this study were 1,248 administrators, faculties, officials, and students in 36 Rajabhat Universities. The data were analyzed by utilized content analysis, percentage, mean, standard deviation, frequency, F-test and factor analysis. The action agenda was designed and checked by Connoisseurship. The results of the documentary analysis revealed that the mission of Rajabhat Universities could be divided into 8 areas: education management, research conduction, academic service for the local communities, art and culture preservation, natural resource and environment conservation, teacher production and development, improvement, development and transference of technology, and institution management. The results of the questionnaire showed that the culture of performance for the university mission was a high level in the two areas: education management and teacher production and development, while the other six areas of performance were at a medium level. It is suggested that every area should be improved to a high level and the most important area is the teacher production and development. As the Rajabhat Universities had 3 types of mixed organizational cultures, clan culture, bureaucratic culture, and adaptability culture, they did not compare their performances with competitors, other comparable organizations or benchmarks. The final results of the study suggested 9 action agenda that the Rajabhat Universities could implement to improve their organizational culture for performance excellence.