A STUDY ON MALAYSIAN PRIVATE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERSHIP ROLES OF HEAD OF DEPARTMENT AND LECTURERS' JOB SATISFACTION

To cope with the current globalization era, higher education institutions play a dominant role in countries' human, social, and economic development. In universities, head of department effective leadership roles has a positive impact on various aspects of the institutional work environment including lecturers' satisfaction and commitment. Lecturers' satisfaction plays a critical part to build a quality teaching and learning environment that leads to producing talented and qualified manpower for the future sustainable development of a country. This research aims to examine the relationship between instructional leadership roles of Head of Department (HOD) towards lecturers' job satisfaction in private higher education institutions. More specifically, the study tries to investigate the impact of leadership roles of the HOD from three various dimensions including instructional leadership, communication and decision-making towards the lecturers' job satisfaction. A quantitative survey method was applied and data collected from randomly distribution of a questionnaire to the samples of 100 lecturers in 5 private higher education institutions in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Data were analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science /version 23) for descriptive (Frequency, Percentage, Mean and Standard Deviation) and inferential (t-test and Pearson Correlation) statistics analysis. The main results obtained from this study show a significant relationship between HOD instructional leadership role, communication role and decision-making role towards lecturers' job satisfaction. The positive correlation shows that relatively high levels on instructional leadership role are paired relatively high level of lecturers' job satisfaction and the low levels of instructional leadership role are paired with relatively low level on their job satisfaction. Besides, the findings indicate that there was no significance difference between instructional leadership roles of HOD from his/her gender perspective. However, the results of this study indicate the necessity for development of leadership practices of HOD so that could systematically acquire and adopt effective instructional leadership qualities to enhance lecturers' job satisfaction with improving their commitment towards their profession. It is hoped that the findings obtained from this research give benefits to the HODs in higher education institutions that improve their instructional leadership roles and practices to make sure that the lecturers are satisfied enough in doing their daily jobs. This will encourage lecturers to contribute more effectively in enhancing the university's performance as a whole.