Academic managerial competency in Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia : validity and factorial invariance of an Australian scale in the Malaysian context
This study’s focus is on validating the second-order three-factor Australian academic managerial competency scale in the Malaysian academic context as well as checking its factorial invariance based on academic leaders’ gender. Furthermore, we performed a descriptive comparison between three samples of academic leaders from Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia based on the validated model. For this purpose, we analyzed the data of 367 academic leaders from 25 Malaysian public and private universities. Upon completion of data screening, we applied the robust Satorra–Bentler method, through which a corrected Chi-square statistic and robust standard errors were generated, to estimate the model’s parameters and compute fit indices using EQS 6.4. We practically addressed the importance of the data's multivariate normality as an essential requirement of the analysis. We achieved this by comparing the selected estimates’ standard errors and z statistics based on the robust maximum likelihood (ML) and conventional ML methods. Our results confirmed the factorial validity of the second-order three-factor Australian academic managerial competency scale in the Malaysian academic context. The validated scale exhibited a high level of factorial invariance based on gender. Moreover, the descriptive comparison showed that the items of the validated model were more important from the sampled Malaysian academic leaders’ perspective than from their Australian and New Zealander counterparts. We thereby contribute to research on management competencies in higher education, provide policy implications, and recommend avenues for future research.
