Sabarudin Zakaria

Understanding transformational leadership and R&D culture in Malaysian universities

Abstract This study seeks to understand how transformational leadership affects R&D culture in Malaysian universities. Purposive sampling was used and 128 questionnaire surveys were collected from six Malaysian universities that are ranked in the 200 Asian Universities in year 2009 by the QS Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. Overall findings show that transformational leadership is positively related to all eight R&D culture variables, i.e., (i) risk taking; (ii) teamwork/group diversity; (iii) tolerance of mistakes/celebrating success; (iv) knowledge sharing; (v) autonomy; (vi) employee participation; (vii) open communication; (viii) social networks. The response rate was low (about 5%) and hence the result is difficult to be generalized. Furthermore, six measures that are suggested to have negative effect on R&D culture have to be discarded due to reliability issue. Despite these limitations, R&D managers in universities are recommended to focus on the proposed eight cultural variables in order to promote a conducive R&D culture in universities.