Capability building and quality management in higher education: An empirical investigation

This paper proposes a resource-capability-based framework of quality management in Higher Education (HE) and empirically tests it against the experience of HE institutes in Pakistan. The paper posits that HE institutions face intensifying global education competition in a world of accelerated globalization, fast pace of technology development, and rapidly growing knowledge. To enhance quality and performance, they need to build higher-order dynamic capabilities of knowledge creation and transfer (KCT) undergirded by orchestrating three sets of resources they own or control: Staff, students, and facilities. The paper hypothesizes how HE institutions can orchestrate the resources to build up dynamic KCT capabilities to enhance quality and performance. To test the hypotheses, the paper collects first-hand data from teaching faculty and administrative staff members of all the public sector universities of Pakistan through a web-based survey. The paper uses SmartPLS version 3 to analyze the collected data and find evidence supporting the hypotheses.