Factors Affecting Students’ Value Co-creation to Institutionalize Sustainability in Academic Structure: The Case of Iranian Agricultural and Natural Resources’ Universities

Abstract

Value co-creation process as a mutual interaction between individuals is a key issue across the management network. Recently, studies have placed a special emphasis on people’s interaction in order to accomplish value co-creation. Given that the process of experience exchange enables us to identify our resources in transactional processes and make collaboration to achieve common values, the purpose of this study was to identify factors affecting student value co-creation to institutionalize sustainability in agricultural and natural recourses universities. Statistical population of the research consisted of 2248students of which 204 students were selected using stratified random sampling. The main research tool was a researcher-made questionnaire whose face and content validity was confirmed by a panel of experts and whose construct validity was confirmed by using explanatory factor analysis (KMO = 0.752; P= 0.01).The reliability was checked by calculating ordinal theta ( 0.89). Data was analyzed by SPSS20.Descriptive findings showed that student value co-creation level was moderate (43.060 percent). The findings of exploratory factor analysis revealed that seven factors including teaching quality, support from top management, students’ social capital, confidence to faculty member, self-efficacy, pro-environmental values, and infrastructures of information and communication technology (ICT) captured 77.74 percent of student value co-creation variance.

Keywords

• sustainability
• sustainable development
• university structure
• value co-creation