Democratic Leadership Among Department Heads in Sabah, Malaysia: A Quantitative Study on Lecturers’ Perceptions

The purpose of this study was to examine lecturers’ perceptions of democratic leadership in Sabah, Malaysia. Sixty-one lecturers from four private higher education institutions in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah completed a questionnaire on Google Forms and data were analyzed using SPSS 29.0. Results showed that only a low number of lecturers tends to perceive their department heads as democratic (52.5 to 68.9 percent). Only one item received a higher level of agreement at 78.7 percent, whereby lecturers agreed that their department heads merge staff’s knowledge and expertise to obtain optimal results or outcomes. On the other hand, nonparametric tests indicated nonsignificant differences by way of gender, age, and job experience in perceived democratic leadership. Additionally, Wilcoxon signed rank test based on a hypothesized value of 3.5 showed that all democratic leadership items were significant at p < 0.001, having medians that were significantly different from the test value, and were likely to indicate strong disagreement. In light of the findings, some recommendations were made on ways to promote democratic leadership within the context of PHEIs in Sabah, Malaysia.