Leadership competencies for achieving SDG-4 during educational crisis in emerging economies

Over the past decades, the issue of quality delivery of education has escalated to a chronic problem in most emerging economies due to poor facilities, insufficient resources, lack of trained teachers, and uneven distribution of avenues to education. This paper is dedicated to leadership competencies to address the crises of quality in the education sector with the imperative role played by educational leaders in instigating organizational resilience, sustainability with the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG-4) purpose of inclusive and equitable quality education to all. This paper determines and designs the key leadership skills necessary to traverse such challenges based on a strict and multi-stage factor identification. The list that started with a broad literature review to receive 37 candidate factors went through several rounds of systematic narrowing down to 16 proven leadership competencies through rounds of expert assessment, field collecting and consensus development. The competencies were outlined and studied within a combining Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) and Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) format. The contributions to the research structure are specific to its ability to build a eight level hierarchical structure between the elementary situational awareness and the expansive strategic planning that demonstrates the step level dependencies of the leadership capabilities. Moreover, the paper uses a two-facet ISM DEMATEL approach and determines the key overlapping competencies among them being Team Building, Communication and Training and Development which appear as predecessors in the management of educational crisis. These overlapping variables come out as very powerful and central to structures, which places strong emphasis on their contribution towards institutional resilience. Basing on the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) theory, the results substantiate the strategic management, information technology, and knowledge management as the essential points of the management of the crisis in the sphere of the educational quality. The study therefore offers a consistent, gradational model of leadership development as well as offers practical guidelines to policymakers and educational leaders wishing to increase the responsiveness to the crisis and quality improvement sustainability in resource strained environments.