Informational Competencies Entrepreneurship and Integral Values in Higher Education

Universities play a key role in modern societies inserted into a globalized economic world. This chapter studies how informational competencies, entrepreneurship, and integral values in higher education are necessary to foster economic growth and fight corruption. The authors especially are focused on distance education as it can be a tool to fight poverty by diminishing high illiteracy rates, mainly existing in developing countries. The purpose of the chapter is two-fold: 1) to study the impact of informational competencies in both education and entrepreneurship, and 2) to emphasize the importance of acquiring integral values by learners to be applied into educational processes based on emotional intelligence. As a result, students will be defined as prospective entrepreneurs endowed with the ability to recognize, internalize and understand emotions to be adjusted into relations and business behavior to impulse their goals. And in this sense, online education has an important role to play, especially in postgraduate studies, as in the case of MOOCs that are also analyzed.

Knowledge Transfer Issues in Teaching

Professional schools typically build their raison d'être on the mission of developing knowledge that can be translated into skills that advance the practice of the professions. On the other hand practitioners fail to adopt the findings of research in fields be it medicine, management or engineering. Further, knowledge created is not always in the usage mode, that too in real life practical situation. Action scientists focused on the characteristics and behaviors of researchers to explain this lack of implementation of research knowledge. Identifying the major gaps between scientific knowledge and actual knowledge transfer issues is crucial in today's scenario. Hence, the purpose of this chapter is to identify knowledge transfer issues, discuss the issues and advancements therein, and highlight practical implications of relating theory to practice with focus on management discipline. The issues discussed herein are not only of utmost importance but crucial for understanding, given the current state of management education, organizational science and knowledge management practices.

Entrepreneurial Orientation and Organizational Learning Ability Analysis for Innovation and Firm Performance

Organizational Learning Ability (OLA) and innovation performance playing a mediating role in the Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) and firm performance, as per this research. Results also suggest that EO improves OLA and innovation performance, which in turn improves firm performance. Innovation performance performs as a mediating variable between EO and firm performance. Our findings make an important contribution to the recent extension of the EO–firm performance research stream focusing on the intermediate links between EO and firm performance. In this paper, we also suggest that the relationship between EO and innovation performance cannot studied ?as a direct relationship, but it is also conditional or dependent on OLA, the organizational factors that facilitate the organizational learning process. EO is a managerial attitude that must be support by certain organizational conditions that facilitate learning and have positive implications for performance. The results support our conceptual model and show its utility in illustrating differences in intra-industry firm performance.

Evaluating Higher Education Institutions through Agency and Resource-Capabilities Theories

The objective of this chapter is to explain through the agency theory and theory of resources and capacities as is the process of assessment in higher education institutions. A model is presented to measure the perception of service quality by students of the Technological Institute of Celaya, as part of the system of quality control, based on the theoretical support of several authors who have developed this topic (SERVQUAL and SERPERF) an instrument adapted to the student area of the institution called SERQUALITC is generated. The paper presents the areas or departments to assess and the convenient size, the number of items used by size and Likert scale, the validation study instrument is mentioned. Finally, it is presented the model that poses a global vision of quality measurement process including corrective action services that enable continuous improvement.

Academic Leadership

Academic Leadership involves managing people in higher education and also elsewhere. Academic leaders could emerge due to their committed and continued pursuit in research; quality assurance; strategies adopted; marketing abilities; contributing education to wider community; developing new programmes and timely reviewing them. The research is aimed at reviewing the literature that exists in this field and to find out the degree or state of academic leadership that exists within the University of Botswana (UB) and how far UB academic leadership has impacted on its vision and mission statement. Primary data was collected through administering a questionnaire within UB on selected five strata of graduate students, academic staff, lower, middle and top management. Respondents were happy with the Academic Leadership in the areas of motivation, professionalism, sense of belonging, building consensus and communication skills.

Management Education and Creativity

The traditional education system is no longer sufficient to educate and prepare the next generation of global leaders. The gap between what management students learn and the skills they need to manage organisations is growing. Creativity is seen as a critical competency for the 21st century manager. The main objective of this chapter is to explore how creativity, as a managerial competency, can be developed through management education to meet the global leadership needs of the 21st century. This will require a paradigm shift; developing curricula and teaching for creativity. Teaching for creativity can be divided into three main steps: planning and preparation; measuring creativity and making amendments; and delivering the lecture. Various insights, principles, tools, steps, and learning strategies were identified to teach creativity. Creativity tests that can be used to measure the creativity levels of management students were also indicated.

Management Education and Leadership Styles

This chapter explains the prospects of management education toward leadership and leadership styles; the overview of leadership; empowering leadership; leadership and social capital; leadership, employee creativity, and innovation climate; transformational leadership; transactional leadership; ethical leadership; charismatic leadership; servant leadership; autocratic leadership; and shared leadership. Management education, through management education programs taught in schools, is very important to prepare next-generation leaders and improve leadership styles required in the competitive environments. Leadership is a process by which an executive can direct and guide the behavior and work of others toward the accomplishment of specific goals in a given situation. Leadership can be exercised through guidance and counseling of the subordinates at the time of execution of plans. Effective leadership styles gained from management education are critical for both setting strategic vision and implementing strategies to drive organizations in the timely and effective manner.

Effective Leadership and Management in Universities through Quality Management Models

Governments around the world have displayed lack of urgency to compel universities leaders and managers to improve the way they prepare the human resources bases of their national economies. The purpose of this research is to specifically evaluate the existing leadership styles and management practices in universities in Nigeria using Quality Management models to identify some excellence-related factors associated with success in the models. This investigation adopted a survey research design. The population of the study consists of university lecturers. A questionnaire was used to gather data through purposeful sampling procedure. The data were analyzed using quantitative research procedures. The findings are that higher education institutions in Nigeria need to adopt a holistic approach to the management of transformation that addresses variety of concerns relating to effective leadership and management, staff development structure and systems reform, effective financial management and research and development.

New Generation Management by Convergence and Individual Identity

In the era of knowledge and innovation, management education cannot be education as it was in the past. This chapter aims to contribute to the topic “New Era in International Management Education”. From the specification of new paradigms of business for the modern era, and definitions of administration, the author raises relevant convergences that necessitate new management qualifications, and so therefore, new forms of administrative education. A central convergence that is included in this chapter is the convergence that the author promotes in Bio Gerencia Virtual®: convergence of information, people and their natural environments, technology and customer orientation. In several countries, the idea of a global context is a foreign one. In this chapter the emphasis is on the challenge to be solved – making “global” synonymous with oneself or close to the human condition, sustainable and influenced largely by culture. We cannot educate for global leadership, with patterns of fragmented thought, or without awareness of satisfying own needs that alter global balance.

Experience as a Catalyst to Student Classroom Learning in Management Education

The chapter describes how instructors can capitalize on student prior experiences and create opportunities for new experiences in the classroom to foster student learning in management education programs. The chapter provides an overview of research around experiential learning (Kolb, 1984; Kolb & Kolb, 2005), learning from experience or on-the-job learning by managers, and teaching techniques that have been shown to foster student learning in management undergraduate and graduate programs. The chapter focuses on experiences that could be created in-class or in the context of one course and does not discuss practices related to a program and curriculum design.