This study examined staff and leadership's attitudes to their work organisation and its environment, and, in particular, the extent to which they preferred a human or task orientation. The study then defined and measured the 'academic culture' of the institution and explored the different effects of emphasising human or task orientations on this academic culture. Finally, the relationship between academic culture and student satisfaction within the institution was explored in the research. The measure of academic culture encompassed 3 domains - planning, the way of doing things, and relationships. A set of survey research instruments was developed and piloted. These instruments measured, in addition to background characteristics of respondents, aspects of attitude to the organisation and perceptions of its academic culture. The results of the study provided evidence that stronger task-oriented attitudes of leaders and staff were associated with academic culture subscales based on 'clarity of the job' and 'goal setting' within the planning domain and 'job performance' within the way of doing things domain. Although the relationship was much weaker, stronger human-oriented attitudes were related to the academic culture subscales of 'communication and relationship' and 'social acceptance' within the relationship domain, and 'leader-subordinate interaction' in the way of doing things domain. In as much as a strong academic culture needs an emphasis on the 3 domains (planning, the way of doing things in an organisation, and relationships), the research suggested that staff and leadership need to be versatile and incorporate both task-oriented and human-oriented approaches. A number of measures of attitudes and perceptions of academic culture were significantly related to the demographic backgrounds of the participants. This emphasised the importance of treating the constructs as multi-dimensional and the leaders, staff, and students as heterogeneous groups. Finally, and importantly, student satisfaction measures were associated with higher academic culture scores / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/235757 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Fazaeli, Ahmad, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, Faculty of Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Source | THESIS_FE_XXX_FAZAELI_A.xml |
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