Organizational Performance in Relation to Human, Organizational and Relational Capital of Universities in Northern India

Abstract

Higher education is an integral enterprise in any economy and its role in a country’s success index is increasing exponentially. Increased competition and technology development has called for greater interest of Governments in the higher education sector. Today knowledge economy is synonymous with global competitiveness and for economies across the world, the critical success factor is the ability to exploit their knowledge potential. In context to higher education, universities are largely those institutions where knowledge creation, dissemination and transfer takes place, thus making them the epicenter of a knowledge based economy.

In the last two decades, India has transformed its higher education landscape tremendously by creating access to low-cost-high-quality university education. With a planned expansion and a learning-driven model, India has successfully bettered its enrolment numbers. Large scale reforms have been undertaken to improve faculty-student ratio by making teaching an attractive career option and expanding capacity for doctoral students at universities. Today India has a student population of 37 million in higher education, which is a force to reckon with. Among them are potential leaders, researchers and entrepreneurs positioned at the helm of knowledge creation, thus making the Indian higher education system worthy of emulation, especially among the developing economies.

Despite these strides of progress, Indian universities do not feature among the best in the world. According to the Times Higher Education BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) & Emerging Economies University Rankings (2016-17), only 27 Indian universities have found place in the top 300. On the other hand China is far ahead in the rankings with 52 universities in the list.

The present study has designed a structural model from the perspective of university faculty members across five selected states of North India, with an objective of enhancing performance of universities in relation to their intellectual capital. The study has highlighted the importance of intellectual capital in the performance of a university. This finding is immensely important because of the emerging knowledge economies throughout the world including India.

The final structural model indicates that having research oriented policies, employee oriented practices in terms of quality work life and perks to retain competent faculty, securing faculty commitment towards university visions, equal employment opportunities, proper decision support systems, a culture of knowledge sharing, dissemination of relevant information, interactive environment at universities and networking taken collectively, significantly contribute towards human capital, organizational capital and relational capital. A final path analysis establishes the fact that intellectual capital has a strong impact on university performance. Thus the study provides an empirically tested model for planners in the higher education sector to enable them strategize around intellectual capital in order to enhance the overall university performance.