Managerial Flexibility Regarding Scholarly Practices Scale: Validity and Reliability Studies in University Environment

Abstract

Recent changes in higher education area has brought new challenges to universities such as collaborating with industry and government, forming alternative teaching programs, gaining external resources and engaging with community. To overcome these challenges, modern universities have to empower their entrepreneurial capacity by facilitating academics’ scholarly activities with different practices. The operation of different managerial practices related to various parts of scholarly activities can be termed as Managerial Flexibility Regarding Scholarly Practices. In the line with this definition, the purpose of the research is to develop a scale related to managerial flexibility regarding scholarly practices. The data were collected from 399 faculty members by using the pilot version of the scale. According to exploratory factor analysis, the scale has 3-factorial structure, and explains 63.67% of variance for managerial practice flexibility. The reliability coefficient was α = .92 for the whole scale, and α = .79 - .86 for its dimensions. The structural model of the scale was also tested by confirmatory factor analysis with the secondary data set which was collected from other 504 faculty members, and 3-factorial structure was confirmed (χ2/df=2.457). As a result, this scale is a valid and reliable data collection instrument to measure managerial flexibility regarding scholarly practices.