Founder Dependency and Organisational Scalability in Expert-Led Online Education: A Study Protocol for an Empirical Survey of Knowledge Codification, Delegation and Quality Control

Background. Expert-led online education organisations are built around the method and authority of a founder. The founder's expertise is the source of the organisation's value, but growth can be limited when core activities cannot proceed without the founder's personal involvement. Existing research usually treats founder centrality through role variables and offers little quantitative evidence on how founder dependency relates to scalability in this setting. Objectives. The study will examine how operational founder dependency is associated with perceived organisational scalability, and how knowledge codification, delegation capability and quality control relate to both. The associations tested are motivated by the Founder Authority Model, but the study is not designed to validate that model as a whole. Methods. A cross-sectional online survey will be conducted among people currently working in expert-led online education organisations. The target is 50 organisations and about 250 valid respondents; 30 organisations and 150 respondents is the minimum for inferential analysis. A new 30-item instrument measures five constructs, six items each, on a five-point agreement scale. The instrument will undergo expert review, cognitive interviews and a pilot before the main survey. The unit of analysis is the individual respondent's perception of organisational characteristics, with respondents clustered within organisations. A simulation-based power analysis indicates that, at the planned sample size, power is limited for the unique associations of codification, delegation and quality control with scalability. Planned analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis, reliability and validity assessment, correlations, and hierarchical regression with cluster-robust standard errors will be used to test five confirmatory hypotheses through seven prespecified tests, with Holm correction across those tests. An interaction between delegation capability and quality control, indirect associations and organisation-level analyses will be treated as exploratory. Contribution. The study will provide definitions and a measure that separate operational founder dependency from founder authority and from the organisational capabilities that surround the founder. It will also provide a multi-organisation test of specific associations derived from conceptual work on founder-led online education. Because the design is cross-sectional, the findings will describe associations, not causal effects.