Managerial Readiness Scale for Academic Managers in Philippine Colleges of Nursing: An Exploratory Sequential Design

Background: Deans of nursing colleges possess a unique capacity to impact the academic community and the practice of nursing. However, existing literature indicates that individuals assigned to this role must be adequately prepared. To date, no scale measures readiness for this role. Objectives: The study aimed to develop a valid and reliable research scale to measure managerial readiness among middle-level academic managers in Philippine nursing colleges. Methods: This study employed exploratory sequential design. Nine informants were purposively chosen for in-depth interviews and five for focus group discussions in the qualitative phase based on the criteria set in the study. One hundred supervisors, coordinators, and deans in various nursing colleges were purposefully selected in the quantitative phase. A thematic analysis was done to extract themes from the informants' views on managerial readiness. This qualitative data was used to develop the managerial readiness scale. Construct validity was done to determine the extent to which the items in a measurement tool represent the entire range of content the tool is supposed to measure. Factor analysis was used to identify the constructs of the data. Results: The informants' lived experiences as deans of nursing were encapsulated in the following themes: constant struggle for managerial skills enhancement, nurturing of managerial and supervision competence, and promotion in the nobility in the nursing education profession. Informants further stated that the underlying dimensions of managerial readiness are as follows: professional expertise, work ethics, leadership effectiveness, intrapersonal skills, affiliation and loyalty, personality and disposition, academic acumen, and administrative backing. Results revealed that the developed managerial readiness scale was factored into five dimensions: leadership and management effectiveness, self-management (intrapersonal) skills, organization conversance, administrative competency, and legal insight. After reliability testing, the reliability of the developed scale in all dimensions was high, indicating that the scale had an excellent internal consistency. Data integration pointed out that the qualitative data connected to and built up the quantitative data in this study. Conclusions: Being a middle-level academic manager was a challenging designation to fill in. Unfamiliarity with one's roles and functions, facing challenges due to the diversity of the roles of being a dean, getting caught in between the demands coming from the upper management, one's subordinates, and other stakeholders; and dealing with workplace politics and work-life imbalance were among the many concerns that deans face daily. Implications: All these issues called for the need to garner years of experience as an academic, improving oneself through formal education and training, and the institution's functional succession planning for middle-level academic managers. Institutions may use the developed managerial scale in this study as it has been found to have high reliability in measuring readiness to be middle-level academic managers in a Philippine nursing college.