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The purpose of this study is to conceptualize, validate and confirm a structural equation modeling (SEM) hypothesized model of strategic leadership practices of Malaysian vocational college educational leaders.

The study used a quantitative survey approach. The data were collected from 500 educational leaders of 65 Malaysian vocational colleges throughout Malaysia using a five-point strategic leadership scale. The gender composition of the sample was almost equivalent. The study embarked on descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis and full-fledged SEM for the data analyses.

The findings revealed that the Malaysian vocational college educational leaders had high tendency and inclination of practicing strategic leadership at their workplace. Besides, there was also evidence that the educational leaders of the Malaysian vocational college exhibited high levels or degree of strategic leadership practices. The responses to the survey items were consistent with seven distinct practices of strategic leadership such as strategic orientation, strategic alignment, strategic intervention, restlessness, absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity and leadership wisdom. The use of SEM procedures had confirmed that the hypothesized model of strategic leadership practices for Malaysian vocational college educational leaders was empirically valid and reliable.

The findings highlighted the importance of planning and development of a specific-context training program for Malaysian vocational college educational leaders in strategic leadership. The training was considered fundamental in pursuit of effective leadership and positive institutional outcomes for such colleges in Malaysia.

The study had successfully formulated, tested and validated a model of strategic leadership practices for Malaysian vocational college educational leaders. The model was believed to be the first of its kind in the Malaysian vocational education context.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the Malaysian literature on three prominent leadership models (instructional, distributed and transformational), linked to a major educational reform initiative captured in the Ministry of Education’s Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB).

The approach is a systematic review of all relevant Malaysian literature, in English and Bahasa Malaysia, on instructional, distributed and transformational leadership and alternative terms linked to these models.

The findings show that there is an emerging literature on these leadership models and their prevalence in Malaysian schools but that they have been interpreted in ways that are distinctive to the highly centralised Malaysian context. For example, instructional leadership is prescribed, so there is some evidence of its practice, notably in respect of monitoring. Similarly, distributed leadership is allocative, rather than emergent, as suggested in western literature.

The findings show that, while research on these models is emerging, much more research is required to establish whether and how leadership practice in Malaysia differs from that outlined in the normative western literature.

There is emerging evidence to suggest that instructional and distributed leadership, if enacted carefully, can have a positive impact on student outcomes.

The leadership models were developed in western, mainly decentralised, contexts, and there are clear implications for how such models might apply in highly centralised cultures, such as that prevailing in Malaysia.

This is believed to be the first systematic review of the Malaysian literature on school leadership models, linked to the MEB. It is also distinctive in including both English language and Bahasa Malaysia sources.

Education institutions persist by transforming leadership skills to manage their knowledge resources efficiently as well as enhance the lecturer’s teaching and learning innovation capabilities. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether knowledge management plays a role of mediator between transformational leadership and teaching and learning innovation in teacher education.

A cross-sectional survey design was used to collect the primary data from 359 teacher educators across Malaysia. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to all the samples, and the collected data was analysed using structural equation modelling approach.

The data analysis indicated that knowledge management did not play the role of a mediator in this study because the direct effect of transformational leadership on teaching and learning innovation was stronger than the indirect effect of transformational leadership through knowledge management.

From the aspect of implications on the practice, it was suggested that all lecturers and head of departments attend clinical training and workshops on knowledge management to further understand the knowledge management processes that could enhance the quality of teaching in teacher education institutes.

This study is perhaps the first study to investigate the role of knowledge management as a mediator between transformational leadership and teaching and learning innovation in teacher education.

Mentoring is a crucial aspect of leadership development. However, the knowledge base about mentoring with regard to student leadership development is still emerging and has yet to be explored in depth. Thus, this paper explores college directors' mentorship, as a form of faculty mentoring, in developing students' leadership in Malaysia.

A qualitative research design was utilized, by which semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from four college directors. Data were analyzed and coded using ATLAS.ti 9.

The findings provide new insights into how college directors mentor students to develop them as leaders. Specifically, the findings show that directors, as transformational leaders, can play a significant mentoring function in enhancing students' leadership via role-modeling for students to accumulate leadership-related knowledge and skills.

This study centered on the role of college directors who are transformational leaders, mentoring with authority, vision and role-modeling for student leaders' leadership development.

The study offers empirical evidence about the significance of college directors' mentorship in enhancing student leadership in Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the findings from research on the relationship between leadership theory and policy reform in Malaysia. Distributed leadership is normatively preferred in the Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB), the country’s major policy reform document. The research was conducted in two dissimilar Malaysian states (Selangor and Sarawak).

The research was a multiple case-study design, with 14 schools (seven in each state). Sampling was purposive, with schools selected from the different bands used to categorise school performance in Malaysia. Within each school, interviews were conducted with principals (secondary schools), headteachers (primary schools) and a range of teachers, middle leaders and senior leaders, to achieve respondent triangulation.

The findings confirm that the MEB prescribes distributed leadership as part of a strategy to move principals and head teachers away from their traditional administrative leadership styles. While there were some variations, most schools adopted a modified distributed leadership approach. Instead of the emergent model discussed and advocated in the literature, these schools embraced an allocative model, with principals sharing responsibilities with senior leaders in a manner that was often indistinguishable from delegation.

A significant implication of the research is that policy prescriptions in major reform initiatives can lead to unintended consequences when applied in different cultural contexts. While distributed leadership is presented as “emergent” in the international (mostly western) literature, it has been captured and adapted for use in this highly centralised context, where structures and culture assume a top-down model of leadership. As a result, distributed leadership has taken on a different meaning, to fit the dominant culture.

The main practical implication is that principals and head teachers are more likely to enact leadership in ways which are congruent with their cultural backgrounds and assumptions than to embrace policy prescriptions, even when unproblematic adoption of policy might be expected, as in this centralised context.

The main social implications are that policy change is dependent on socio-cultural considerations and that reform will not be whole-hearted and secure if it is not congruent with the values of institutions such as schools, and the wider society which they serve.

The paper is significant in exploring a popular leadership model in an unfamiliar context. Beyond its importance in Malaysia, it has wider resonance for other centralised systems which have also shown interest in distributed leadership but have been unable and/or unwilling to embrace it in the ways assumed in the literature. This leads to theoretical significance because it adds to the limited body of literature which shows that allocative distributed leadership has emerged as a device for accommodating this model within centralised contexts.

The purpose of this study is to examine the key challenges currently prevalent in the Machinery and Equipment (M&E) sector of Malaysia and to offer an integrative Industry 4.0 strategic roadmap. The Environmental Scan 2016 and 2018 provides a basis for the identification of the challenges in the M&E sector of Malaysia. The study further investigates the challenges by analyzing the responses of four major stakeholders in a Focus Group Discussion. The findings reveal that the M&E sector suffers from very low automation adoption. This study is among the first few to analyze the challenges in the M&E sector and lay out a strategic roadmap encompassing the role of each stakeholder at every phase of the transition toward Industry 4.0. The proposed method of transitioning through targeted incentive schemes will help academics and practitioners in developing concrete and workable action plans to conduct the transition process.

This study aims to examine the status of entrepreneurship education (EE) in Malaysia and entrepreneurship education programmes (EEPs) offered by Malaysian public and private higher education institutions (HEIs), against the backdrop of macro-level context of Malaysian government institutions related to entrepreneurship.

This study replicates and extends the research by Maritz et al. (2015, 2019). The study expands a nascent archetype regarding an iterative and systematic open-ended emergent enquiry, together with data collection from Malaysian HEIs.

The findings suggest significant emergence of EE (programmes and research) in Malaysia, despite EEPs being sparsely distributed across HEIs in the bottom half of Table 1. The top ten HEIs (12% of all HEIs in Table 1) accounted for 35% of all EEPs. This study highlights the significant influence of Malaysian government institutions related to entrepreneurship on EE and EEPs.

The findings are subject to the availability and accuracy of information and documents available on official websites of HEIs. This limitation has been mitigated with telephone and email inquiries and other sources of information.

The findings provide critical grounding and inferences on the status of EE and EEPs in Malaysia for researchers, practitioners, HEIs, governments and other stakeholders.

This study is first of its kind on emergent enquiry into the status of EE in Malaysia and EEPs offered by 19 public HEIs and 67 private HEIs in Malaysia. Moreover, this study links macro-level context of the Malaysian government institutions related to entrepreneurship with micro-level context of EE and EEPs.

BUSINESS SCHOOL GRAFFITI is a highly personal and revealing account of the first ten years (1965–1975) at Britain’s University Business Schools. The progress achieved is documented in a whimsical fashion that makes it highly readable. Gordon Wills has been on the inside throughout the decade and has played a leading role in two of the major Schools. Rather than presuming to present anything as pompous as a complete history of what has happened, he recalls his reactions to problems, issues and events as they confronted him and his colleagues. Lord Franks lit a fuse which set a score of Universities and even more Polytechnics alight. There was to be a bold attempt to produce the management talent that the pundits of the mid‐sixties so clearly felt was needed. Buildings, books, teachers who could teach it all, and students to listen and learn were all required for the boom to happen. The decade saw great progress, but also a rapid decline in the relevancy ethic. It saw a rapid withering of interest by many businessmen more accustomed to and certainly desirous of quick results. University Vice Chancellors, theologians and engineers all had to learn to live with the new and often wealthier if less scholarly faculty members who arrived on campus. The Research Councils had to decide how much cake to allow the Business Schools to eat. Most importantly, the author describes the process of search he went through as an individual in evolving a definition of his own subject and how it can best be forwarded in a University environment. It was a process that carried him from Technical College student in Slough to a position as one of the authorities on his subject today.

Researches have documented the impact of dyadic communication and relationships on individual behavior in workgroups. However, communication remains as the background element in leadership and management literature as opposed to being the primary process in the leader‐member relationships development. The purpose of this paper is to establish and interpret the appropriate level of analysis based on the correlation between leader‐member exchange (LMX) quality, supervisory communication and team‐oriented commitment in a Malaysian organization setting.

A survey from a Malaysian organization (n=201) is analyzed on the relationships between LMX quality, supervisory communication and commitment using within and between analysis (WABA).

The individual dyad relationships and communication correlates with team‐oriented commitment at the group level. Therefore, LMX quality and supervisory communication influence overall team‐oriented commitment in a work group.

Given that the analyses are based on self‐report in one organization, these results have to be handled carefully.

The results implied that the relationship between dyadic relationships quality, supervisory communication and team‐orientated commitment is best connected if individual workers in work group are encouraged to communicate their needs to supervisors. As such, the worker's ability to communicate mutually about relationships (LMX quality and positive relationships communication) and work (upward openness and job relevant communication) with their immediate supervisor implicates both personal fit and work group functioning.

The results extend the authors' understanding of LMX quality, supervisory communication and team‐oriented commitment by identifying the specific form levels of analysis in a Malaysian organization setting.