Editorial

Citation

Roberts, B. (2014), "Editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 28 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-02-2014-0015

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 28, Issue 4.

Welcome to Issue 4 of Volume 28 in 2014. There are eight papers in this issue by a wide range of authors coming from New Zealand, UK, Ireland, India, Kurdistan, Iran, Malaysia, USA, Finland and Romania. In fact this seems to be the most geographically diverse issue yet.

The first paper is entitled "The functions, attributes and challenges of academic leadership in New Zealand Polytechnics" by Carol Cardno of the Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. Carol states that increased accountability generates increased pressure on leadership which is seen as having a direct impact on the quality of student learning. The study looks at New Zealand's Polytechnic academic leaders. The academics face similar problems to colleagues in other countries but tensions still remain about the role of teaching/research and the institutional goals.

Daniel Boduszek of the University of Huddersfield, with colleagues from Huddersfield and Dublin Business school, contribute a piece on "Teachers" self-efficacy beliefs, self-esteem and job stress as determinants of job satisfaction. The main aim of the research was to examine the role of teaching in self-efficacy, perceived stress, self-esteem and demographic characteristics (age, gender, education and years of teaching experience) in predicting job satisfaction within a sample of 121 Irish primary school teachers. The study concludes that perceived stress was found to explain unique predictive variance with high levels of occupation stress related to low levels of job satisfaction.

Ritika Mahajan (ITT Roorkee) and colleagues write on "Factors affecting quality of management education in India-an interpretive structural modelling approach", and explains their significance and mutual influences using interpretive structural modelling. The study shows that leadership emerges as the most important factor followed by organisational structure and practices.

A contribution from Saeed Sadeghi Boroujerdi (University of Kurdistan) and Kaweh Hasani (Islamic Azad University, Iran) discusses thinking style and its relation to creativity in physical education teachers. The results showed that there is no significant relationship between individual characteristics (gender, work experience, education) and style of thinking but there is a significant relationship between creativity and thinking style.

"Factors affecting knowledge sharing intention among academic staff" is the next work from Naser Khani (Islamic Azad University, Iran), with three colleagues from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The aim of this study was to investigate factors affecting knowledge sharing among academic staff in Universities. Using the theory of reasoned action as the framework the main objective of the study was threefold:

1. to examine the relationship between attitude, subjective norm and trust with knowledge sharing intentions;

2. to examine the relationship among factors, i.e., self-efficacy, social networks and extrinsic rewards with attitude towards knowledge sharing intentions; and

3. to find out the relationship between organisational support and subjective norms.

Soribel Genao (Queen's College, New York) gives information on the measurement of the effectiveness of alternative education programmes. The study aimed to determine if new alternative education programmes had led to goals being achieved for student achievement and post secondary outcomes. Findings from the study will add to the evidence on school dropout programmes and whether the organisational structures specifically set up to support the collaboration are working.

Atul Gupta and Sara Bennett (Lynchburg College, Virginia, USA) write on "An empirical analysis of the effect of MBA programmes on organisational success". The expansion of MBAs in business schools shows that in Harvard, for example, graduates have a high employability record. The authors wondered what happens to the large number of students from other less prestigious universities and actually what is the value of an MBA if it is not from one of the top schools. The findings suggest that the MBA adds value to the alumni as well as to the employer.

The last paper focuses on dilemmas challenging reputation management in Higher Education and it is written by Kati Suomi (University of Turku, Finland) and four co-authors, two from Turku, one from London Metropolitan University and one from Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Bucharest Romania). The paper introduces one Finnish multidisciplinary master's degree programme as a case study-the empirical data comprises a student survey and semi-structured interviews with internal and external stakeholders whose work relates to the master's programme.

Brian Roberts