Organisational self-efficacy and information asymmetry as pathways to strengthening management effectiveness in Malaysian public universities

Abstract

The commitment to national policy goals and institutional alignment is highly consistent in Malaysian public universities, and it is a reflection of genuine and shared commitment towards the Malaysia Higher Education Blueprint. Riding on this robust motivational pillar, the current paper explores the capability investments in the capacity to transform the already-existing commitment of the staff into management effectiveness which is measurable in the 20 publicly funded Malaysian universities. The paper utilises the Performance Intentions Gap (PIG) to illustrate the application of this keen diagnostic tool to indicate where operational investment would result in the greatest payback to the motivational capital already held by institutions, according to the Social Cognitive Theory and the Organisational Information Processing Theory. The research conducted the fieldwork in the form of a questionnaire with 107 respondents in the category of the top management staff in five categories of universities under MOHE classification. It evaluated six psychosocial measures in two governance dimensions that are government intentions, which constitute goal orientation, outcome commitment and relational alignment, and institution intentions, which constitute risk awareness, institutional ability and oversight engagement. As the data distributions of all research variables were non-normal, as well as interpretation capability Discrepancy Score, Spearman correlation and hierarchical multiple regression were performed. To achieve the marker-level diagnostic accuracy, the intention capability discrepancy score was used. Findings indicate that there are no cases when all constructs are rated with a score lower than 'very high' (mean = 4.009 to 4.185), an indication that leaders in universities of all types have a strong and real conviction of their institutional goals. More significantly, when capability factors are added, the percentage of explained variance of management effectiveness goes up by 17 adjusted R, moving up by 7% from 0.342 to 0.510. This finding suggests that the motivational foundation is factual and considerable, and the most effective method of disengaging them would be through planned skill growth in the fields of Institutional Ability and Risk Awareness. The Intention Capability Discrepancy Score also shows three very important spheres of investment (i.e., research infrastructure, financial resilience and performance-tracing systems) where a planned operational development will lead to the most significant effects in management effectiveness. The study provides an effective diagnosis model, a repeatable measurement method and, most importantly, evidence-based suggestions of how to enhance the capability fit in the higher education system in Southeast Asia.