Organizational capabilities and strategic leaders personal characteristics as potential determinants for quality practice performance in North Western Nigerian universities

Abstract

Quality practice performance is the general atmosphere of an institution that propagates practices such as act of relevance, integrity, professionalism and trust, which are born out of the commitment of the staff in order to achieve organizational goals and visions. Based on this, the present research intends to investigate how personal leadership characteristics (PLC) and organizational capabilities (OC) mediating effect of organization politicking (OP) and quality culture (QC) could predict quality practice performance in universities. Therefore, quantitative survey design was employed, with a total sample of 226 respondents among Dean’s and HOD’s in the 15 (universities) in the North western Nigeria. The tool used for data collection in the study was questionnaire of which the proportional stratified random sampling was utilized as the sampling technique procedure. Descriptive statistics was used for demographic data analysis while Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) as well as the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to assess the psychometrics properties of the scales. SPSS version 20 and AMOS version 20 of the Structural Equation modeling (SEM) were employed in the analysis. This is to have an effective analysis of the obtained data as well as to have a good model base on the validity and reliability of each construct in the study. The study found that personal characteristics (PC) influence organizational politicking (OP) in north Western Universities. It also found that organizational politicking (OP) plays a full mediating role between personal characteristics and quality practice performance (QPP). The main implication of this result is that organizational politicking is seen as the bi-directional factor that can either be used against or for the realization of organizational capabilities which could lead to quality practice performance in the institutions of higher learning in Nigeria. Meanwhile, the unique contribution to the theory from this present research is that it introduces organization politicking and quality culture as a mediator between personal characteristics and quality practice performance.