Leaders' Degree of Strategic Improvisation Practice from Education Employees' Perspective

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the degree to which leaders in the Ministry of Education practice strategic improvisation from the perspective of the ministry's employees. It also sought to identify the significance of differences in their responses based on gender, academic qualification, and years of experience. A descriptive survey method was employed, with a questionnaire as the tool for data collection. The study population included all employees at the Jordanian Ministry of Education headquarters, totaling 1,510 individuals, from which 305 employees were selected using the stratified random sampling method. The findings revealed that the practice of strategic improvisation by leaders in the Jordanian Ministry of Education and its dimensions—intuition, creativity, adaptation to change, and risk perception—was of a moderate level. In addition, the study indicated statistically significant differences at the (α ≤ 0.05) level in the average responses of the study sample regarding the degree of strategic improvisation practice by ministry leaders in the four dimensions. These differences were attributed to the academic qualification variable, in favor of employees with doctoral and master's degrees, and the years of experience variable, in favor of those with long and medium experience. However, no difference was found based on the gender variable. The study recommended that the Ministry of Education adopt an organizational culture that encourages strategic improvisation by emphasizing intuition, creativity, adaptation to change, and risk perception while granting sufficient authority to ministry leaders to practice strategic improvisation in ways that enhance workflow and improve the quality of outcomes.