Organizational Differences among Universities in Three Socioeconomic Contexts: Finland, Spain and Ecuador. Relational Coordination Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Title

The title summed up reads as “Differences among three universities” and could be improved by adding information about the methods (is it empirical research?) or adding information about the direction of the differences. My suggestion to improve the title: “Organizational differences among three universities from Finland, Spain, and Ecuador – relational coordination explains student satisfaction”

You need to explain the abbreviations ARCADA, UCO, ESPAM when they are mentioned the first time. It would be better not to mention the names in the title.

Abstract

Line 5-6 “to identify the organizational differences … with different contexts from RC dimensions” – “from” seems wrong, I am not a native speaker and am not sure if I understood, but maybe try “regarding” instead.

Line 6 “Relational Coordination” needs to be briefly introduced/explained to the reader, for example as “relationships of shared goals”.

Line 7 “a random sample ... were” change to “was”. Is it truly random? In the methods section you describe it as stratified.

Line 8 “around” seems wrong here. The English language could be improved with proof reading by a native speaker.

Line 9 You need to explain the abbreviations ARCADA, UCO, ESPAM when they are mentioned the first time.

Line 10 Level of satisfaction is the dependent variable. This is not clear in this sentence. Here, you should mention all the factors/covariates and dependent variable(s) of your model.

Line 13 did you mean “problem solving communication”?

Line 14 is it “student satisfaction”? specify this.

Line 15 The order of the parts of the abstract is a bit loose. For example:  “RC differentiation among three Universities through discriminant analysis was built.” This can be deleted because you stated this in the methods in lines 10-11. Pay more attention to the distinct structure of the abstract: Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion.

Line 16 no comma

Line 17 add “In conclusion, …”

Introduction

Line 46 no comma

Line 58-59 change to “how resources can be organized best”

Line 59 change to “to maximize an institution’s performance” or “organisation’s”

Line 87 to improve what? Finish the sentence.

Line 88 Specify the research hypothesis.

Line 92 “In the first stage, the organizational variables were identified by general linear model (GLM) by university and satisfaction.” Did you mean “the impact of organizational variables on student satisfaction were identified by GLM”?

Line 108 “had” change to “has”

Lines 101 to 109 can be deleted or shortened because you already present this information in Table 1. This whole section 1.1 can be shortened considerably. If you have a section 1.1 I expect at least another section 1.2.

Rather than giving information on the country level, you should give information about the three universities. How are the students from the three universities comparable? Did you check for similarities according to age and gender? How is the composition of the fields of study of these three universities? Are they comparable? Are the ARCADA and the ESPAM closer to another in their composition of degree programmes than the UCO? Then this would explain your results (Figure 2). Document that this is not the case and your results are more valuable.

Materials and Methods

Line 165 How was this randomization per university achieved? Describe in more detail. Was it the same approach in each university? And then, you selected one hundred students. Did they all participate and delivered complete answers? There were 0 missing values? Every student answered each item? I congratulate you on your conscientious students.

Line 168-9. You cannot give one overall Cronbach’s alpha value for the whole survey. You need to at least present three values, differentiated it by (1) the RC scale, dimension 1 (communication) and (2) dimension 2 (relationship dimension) and (3) the satisfaction scale. The three scales were developed by [42]? I recommend to mention the scales in order: first the independent variable, then the dependent. Why “over 0.87”, give the exact values.

Line 170 no comma

Table 2: As a note to Table 2 or in the text leading to Table 2, present the wording of the questions. I can only fantasize that it is “How do you rate the communication at your university?” or something like that.

Line 181: What does this mean “disaggregated by participants’ profiles”? Explain.

Line 184: How did you determine this threshold of 19? Was it the middle of the distribution of answers? By grouping you lose much of the information you gathered through your elaborated design of the questionnaire with the many items and the answer scale. Also try a different analysis where you can use the information by implementing student satisfaction as a continuous variable.

Line 192-3 What is your rationale to define student satisfaction as independent (factor) and RC as dependent? In my logic, the causal relation would be RC influences student satisfaction.

Line 199 Is this the p-value from the GLM?

Line 198 I am not an expert at discriminant analysis, thus I cannot comment on this section.

Line 235 “were” change to “are”

Figure 1 You exaggerate the effects and hinder the comparability of the six panels. Change the scale of the y-axis to present the whole answer scale from 1-5.

Line 240 Again, is this the p-value from the GLM?

Figure3 For enhanced readability of the Figure add the country names to the labels.

Discussion

Line 288-9 This information is already presented in lines 208-9.

How are the results explained by the circumstances outlined in section 1.1?

What do your results indicate for the development of the three universities?

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting and valuable article for the scientific community. It is well founded on relevant authors within the subject it addresses, and they are also up-to-date.
However, I suggest the following tasks be carried out:
1. The intentions of the study, objectives, are not highlighted, there are no research questions. This leads to the conclusions drawn from the study being unclear, it does not follow that these conclusions respond
2. Determine clearly and precisely the people who have responded to the questionnaire, how these people have been selected.
3. Regarding the questionnaire. Data is missing from it, only the reliability data is provided. But nothing is said about its validation of both content and construction.
4. It is not really known what questions have been asked, the questionnaire is not there and therefore we only have the groups of questions and the statistical data. It would be important to provide the questionnaire
In short, it is a good article but the authors should clarify these questions that I indicate

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Dear Education Sciences Journal Reviewer,

We appreciate the effort of the review and your observations, and we inform that we have taken them into account for the review of our article and that they have allowed us to improve our manuscript.

In the following points you can see the modifications we have made:

Point 1: The intentions of the study, objectives, are not highlighted, there are no research questions. This leads to the conclusions drawn from the study being unclear, it does not follow that these conclusions respond. 


Response 1: According to your suggestion, we found that the objective was expressed in a confusing way.

To clarify the objective, it has been redrafted and three research questions have been added to frame its structure.

This is the new text:

“Satisfaction showed a customer orientation, linking what it is expected from one stu-dent with the obtained result [23]. Student’s perceived satisfaction showed the efficiency of organizations at different areas of activity: Academic services, administrative services, teaching staff, training programs, etc. [24]. However, there is still a lack of empirical research that examines the relationship between RC and students’ satisfaction in order to solve some questions such us: How deep is that relationship? Does an improvement in RC increase student satisfaction? Furthermore, in the current literature, the findings are based on cases that can hardly be extended to other universities. Addi-Raccah and Gavish [25], Lee and Yu [26] and Noël et al. [27] identified organizational differences through discriminant analysis. A comparison among universities al-lows identifying the key organizational factors that differentiate them. This can enable the design of strategic measures oriented to improve the quality of performances.

We pose the following research questions: RQ1) Do universities located in devel-oped countries showed a higher level of CR?; RQ2) Do the most satisfied students have a higher level of RC?; RQ3) Is it possible to build an organizational model that differentiates the three institutions?

Therefore, the objective of this study was to identify the organizational differences among three universities with different socioeconomic contexts and between two lev-els of student satisfaction, from the RC perspective. The cases of Arcada University of Applied Science (ARCADA), University of Cordoba (UCO) and Agricultural Polytech-nic of Manabi “MFL” (ESPAM) with different satisfaction levels and socioeconomic contexts were selected. The analysis was developed in two stages. In the first stage, considering the 23 organizational variables proposed, those variables with significant differences among the three universities and between the two levels of satisfaction by general linear model (GLM) were identified. In the second stage, the organizational differences among the three universities were explained by discriminant analysis”.

In addition, the discussion and conclusions have been modified to clarify answer the research questions.

This is the new text:

“4. Discussion

The relational coordination framework provides an excellent basis for investigating the types of organizational models at universities [7,16,17,47]. According to [48], higher levels of relational coordination improve results. RC model can be useful to achieve excellent results in higher education where high levels of task interdependence, uncertainty, time restrictions and tacit knowledge are required [7]. In the case of higher education, it is important to identify best organizational practices to apply at universities, as well as the differences among universities, which contribute to the global knowledge of the importance of RC on the results of the organization [16,20]. The methodology developed in this research has allowed, in a first step, identifying the relational coordination variables that promote differences among universities and satisfaction levels. In a second stage, according to Addi-Raccah and Gavish [25], Lee and Yu [26] and Noël et al. [27], a canonical discriminant function for the ARCADA, UCO and ESPAM universities, in three countries and very different socioeconomics contexts has been built.

RQ1 was not validated in this study. According to De-Pablos-Heredero et al. [19], an improvement in organizational practices leads to an improvement in results regardless of the socioeconomic context.

RQ2 was validated, finding a positive relationship between RC and student satisfaction level. In the three universities there is a positive relationship between RC and satisfaction. This relationship is more prominent in the case of ESPAM (Figure 1). In ESPAM, with high levels of RC, the highest values of satisfaction have been obtained. In ESPAM, which is a small size public university in a developing country with low economic growth, the level of satisfaction is very sensitive to the modifications in RC in the administrative officers profile [7]. According to the Pisa-D report [34] Ecuador requires an improvement in digital literacy, so there is a greater dependence on administrative officers [7]. Therefore, the different social contexts could explain part of the differences in organizational patterns [28].

Accurate and solving problem communication, mutual respect and shared knowledge and goals are strategic factors to improve de RC. The results obtained show that the personalized service to the student is positively valued by considering individual circumstances. Gallego et al. [16,17] and Margalina et al. [7] showed how in universities with high quality levels, the institutional coordination with students was strong. Havens et al. [15] and Haider et al. [13] paid attention to the similarities be-tween teamwork quality and RC. Lacayo-Mendoza and De-Pablos-Heredero [47] indicated that the majority of students highly value the facilities provided by educational staff. Finally, results show that others outstanding attributes are shared goals with students' representatives and with administrative officers. Gallego et al. [16,17] and Margalina et al. [7] concluded how in universities exhibiting high quality levels, the institutional coordination with students is strong.

The construction of a discriminant model verified RQ3. Knowing the three most discriminating variables, it is possible to propose concrete, simple and economic measures to improve educational quality. The results of this research allow establish-ing the organizational differentiation among three Universities though discriminant analysis. Shared goals, with lectures and administrative officers, and the communication for solving problem among classmates were the variables with the highest discriminant power. UCO was the most differentiated university according to RC (Figures 2 and 3). This differentiation explains the fact that it is the highest ranked university in the world ranking of universities (Table 1).

Three different universities could be discriminated by the organizational models generated. Therefore, it shows that discriminant analysis is useful for design the improvement the relational practices in each university. Shared goals are a key piece for university excellence [17], therefore measures that allow sharing the objectives of the students with lectures and administrative officers are crucial. In order to enhance this, improvements are proposed in digital literacy for communication with administrative officers [7] and changes in the teaching guides where the lectures establish specific objectives for the students in each subject. Solving problem communication shows that the students use the educational ecosystem in moments of lack of information [16,17]; In this way, the creation of direct communication mechanisms among students and other profiles is proposed to solve the problems of university life.

Apart from this, it would be of great interest to develop prediction models for each set of organizational variables over satisfaction. This issue could be developed in future research lines by applying structural equation models. This approach could be extended to different universities and contexts.

5. Conclusions

This research contributes to a novel approach since it allows the universities to differentiate their relational coordination model by discriminant analysis.

In each university, as the relational coordination dimensions of accurate, frequent and problem-solve oriented communication are improved, the level of satisfaction in-creases. It has not been verified that a higher level of economic resources in the country explains an improvement in the results of the university. However, ESPAM was very sensitive to organizational changes. Those universities that implement a program of best practices in relational coordination will achieve higher levels of quality in term of student satisfaction.

The canonical discriminant model built according to the coordination dimensions classified a 69.32% of the cases. Three organizational variables were enough to explain differences among universities. These variables were shared goals, with lectures and administrative officers, and the communication oriented to solve problems among classmates. These were the variables with the highest discriminant power. UCO, with the best position in the ranking, showed the greatest organizational differences.

The proposed models can easily be adapted and applied to different contexts and, therefore, they can be of great interest for the improvement of quality at universities. The results were validated but are conditioned in each university by its standard of satisfaction values”.

Point 2: Determine clearly and precisely the people who have responded to the questionnaire, how these people have been selected.

Response 2: According to your suggestion, we have clarified the composition of the sample and data collection.

This has been modified in the Materials and Methods section. The new text is as follows:

“A stratified random sample composed of 300 surveyed students, 100 from each university, was collected during the period 2017-2018. The initial data started from a database for each university, made up of 200-1000 data each one. Incomplete surveys and those that showed logical inconsistencies were deleted. Finally, a group of 100 surveys from each university was randomly selected with the random function of the spreadsheet software, making up the complete database with 300 surveys”.

Currently, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in new researches we have conducted an online survey, which cannot be sent unless all the questions have been answered by the student. This is allowing us to compose a database with fewer flaws.

In Results section, the information on the distribution of students by gender, age and field of knowledge has been presented:

“          The three universities showed an average age of students less than 25 years in 86% of the sample (p-value < 0.05). Regarding gender, the distribution was uniform in AR-CADA. However, in UCO most of the students were women (p-value < 0.001) and in ESPAM most of the students were men (p-value < 0.05). Regarding the field of knowledge, significant differences were found among the three universities. In AR-CADA 100% of the data corresponded to the Social Sciences (p-value < 0.001), in UCO the Health Sciences predominated (90%) (p-value < 0.001) and in ESPAM the Engineer-ing obtained the highest percentage (72% (p-value < 0.05). The sociodemographic indi-cators of the sample are shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Sociodemographic distribution of the sample (%).

* p-value < 0.05; ** p-value < 0.01; *** p-value < 0.001; ns = not significantly different.    ”

Table 3 has been added for this modification. Therefore, Tables 3 and 4 of the original version of the article are Tables 4 and 5 in the current version.

Point 3: Regarding the questionnaire. Data is missing from it, only the reliability data is provided. But nothing is said about its validation of both content and construction.

Point 4: It is not really known what questions have been asked, the questionnaire is not there and therefore we only have the groups of questions and the statistical data. It would be important to provide the questionnaire. In short, it is a good article but the authors should clarify these questions that I indicate.

Response 3-4: According to your suggestion, we have expanded the information on the validation of the survey and its content.

Regarding the validation of the survey, Cronbach's Alpha has been calculated for each dimension and for satisfaction and the three indicators are shown in in a new column of Table 2. The development of this indicator is based on the work of [42], which becomes [41] because of the modifications to the text. The value of the complete survey has been indicated [20, 41].

This is the new text:

 “The survey’s reliability was verified by means of Cronbach’s alpha, with values greater than 0.7, acceptable to confirm internal consistency: communication dimension (0.703), relationship dimension (0.831) and satisfaction (0.793) (Table 2). The complete survey showed a Cronbach's alpha of 0.87 [20,41]”.

In order to expand the information of the survey content, the whole survey has been added to the article as supplementary material (Table S1).

This has been indicated in the text as follows:

“The 23 items of the RC model focused on the mechanisms involved in organizational practices are shown in Table 2. 11 variables of the communication dimension, 12 of relationship dimension and 6 related to the level of student satisfaction were used. The students answered each question of the survey (Table S1) as many times as profiles were observed at the university”.

In the main text, in Table 2, the second column “α Cronbach” has been added to clarify the information on validation. In addition, the survey questions have been added in Table 2, next to the variable code:

Table 2. Relational coordination and satisfaction variables.

Finally, the ABSTRACT section has been modified to adapt it to the rest of the article's modifications.

This is the new writing:

“The knowledge of local culture is essential to establish competitive strategies in higher education. The objective of this research was to identify the organizational differences among three universities with different international contexts regarding Relational Coordination (RC) attributes: accurate communication, frequent communication, problem solving communication, shared knowledge, mutual respect and shared goals, by discriminant analysis method. A random sample of 300 students, 100 belonging to each university, was surveyed on the 23 RC variables in 2017-2018. First, general linear models were performed with the RC variables. The three universities —Arcada University of Applied Science (ARCADA) in Finland, University of Cordoba (UCO) in Spain and Agricultural Polytechnic of Manabi “MFL” (ESPAM) in Ecuador— and the two levels of student satisfaction —Low and High— were used as fixed factors to find significant differences by groups. Second, a discriminant model was built with the significant RC variables. Significant differences were found by both factors. Those universities that had implemented a program of best practices based on accurate, frequent, and problem solving communication achieved higher levels of student satisfaction. RC differentiation among three universities showed that shared goals with lectures and administrative officers and problem solving communication among classmates were the variables with the highest discriminant power. Two clusters were obtained, where UCO was the most differentiated university. In conclusion, organizational practices made a difference between the three universities. The positive relationship be-tween CR and satisfaction was verified. Discriminant analysis can be adapted and applied to different universities in order to improve quality”.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has been improved in accordance with my suggestions, e.g., the description of the methods has been improved. However, I am not convinced of the logical coherence of the paper, therefore I suggested that a second reviewer should take a look at the manuscript. Also, a native speaker should look at the English language.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf