Servant Leadership, Leadership Competency, Self-Efficacy and Job Performance of Malaysian Universities’ Leaders

Abstract

Malaysia is inspired to become the world's education hub as stated in the Malaysia Blueprint for Higher Education 2015-2025 and Malaysia is targeting to achieve the admission of 250,000 foreign students in the year 2025. To attract foreign students to enrol in a university is through the university's ability to be known as a world-class university. One of the factors that can make a university to be considered a world-class university is its achievements and the achievements of a university depend on the leadership of its leader. Hence, the purpose of undertaking this research was to examine the relationship between servant leadership, leadership competency and self-efficacy with the job performance of Malaysian public universities' leaders. Findings showed that the independent variables (servant leadership, leadership competency, and self-efficacy) do have a significant relationship with the universities' leaders' job performance with p-value = 0.000 and all t-values higher than 1.675. Although all hypotheses are supported and the model is found to fit with the data with R2 = 56.7%, one of the profound limitations of this study is the inability of the results to be generalised as this study only involved public universities' leaders. Future researchers could consider extending similar research by involving the private universities' leaders or other leaders from different industries. Nevertheless, this research does provide a meaningful contribution to the policymakers, university leaders, students as well as other practitioners from the human resources and management field.