Mr.Khay

Globalization, Decentralization and Flatter Structure Redesign for SLO

Globalization is a generic term and shadows every country for global competitiveness, benchmarking and ranking from economic performance (global GDP growth rate…) to education performance (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS). No country is immune to the globalization process (Mok, 2006) and the concept of knowledge society (Zajda, 2015; Mok, 2006) or information/digital society emerges for all governments to address quality education. The link between quality education and economic growth was confirmed (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2010; Hanushek & Wößmann, 2007). Therefore, education reform has been the top agenda for every government as a response to the ultimate needs of economic growth and global competitiveness. Globalization may render centralized education systems obsolete due to bureaucratic and hierarchical processes which hinder responsiveness and flexibility (McGinn & Welsh,1999) in the constantly changing environment. Decentralization is a major reform tool for quality service delivery that the governments use as a remedial solution for society (Parry, 1997). According to Leung (2004), educational decentralization is a global trend that almost all countries worldwide have implemented or are implementing. School-based management (SBM) is a popular government strategy for improving quality of education, despite its dichotomy of research findings to confirm its link with student's learning outcomes (Santibañez, 2006; De Grauwe, 2005). The rationale for the debatable SBM’s impacts on quality learning was argued for the SBM to be conceptualized for managerial reforms not for teaching and learning reform (De Grauwe, 2005). 

School to sustain in the constantly changing environment is to transform to Learning Organization, which was argued to well tackle with internal ineffectiveness and to seamlessly adapt with external threats. According to Kools & Stoll (2016), School as Learning Organization is the one "that has the capacity to change and adapt routinely to new environments and circumstances as its members, individually and together, learn their way to realizing their vision”. Being an LO is fluid and adaptive to the constantly changing environment which will nurture creativity and innovation as firm response to the changes. To achieve this, SLO must set a new paradigm perimeter to foster creativity and innovation as a product of their continuous learning. As it was argued by Senge (1990), team learning requires more than just knowing and communicating within teams. Team learning must be deep to align their mental models to achieve a shared vision and strategic goals. Since individual staff comes with their distinct culture, team learning is argued to converge all the difference into one which involves intertwining culture and value. Unfortunately, aligning the mental model, culture and value can't be achieved by superficial talk or discussion, it needs trust, time and deep collaboration to foster a culture of proactiveness and risk-taking. Having reviewed several findings of SLO implementation in European schools, hierarchical structure was argued to raise the high barrier for team learning and the SLO implementation. Bureaucracy, power distance and high norm are all factors to hinder all three levels of learning process (individual, team and organizational levels of learning).

Will redesigning flatter structure or reducing hierarchy fix the issue of SLO implementation at school? SLO model implies the reform to flatter structure to empower the learning at all levels to achieve the shared inclusive vision. Flatter structure was less popular in school research but it will narrow the communication gaps among school staff through reduced layers in reporting and channels of communication. According to Ghiselli & Siegel (1972), flat structure had few levels of management and broad span of control. Flat structure was argued to correlate with staff well-being (Webb, 2023) but it did not make any difference in terms of performance when comparing with staff performance (Carzo Jr & Yanouzas, 1969). Although flatter structure is indifferent from hierarchical structure, it is argued to redesign flatter structure to reduce hierarchy, empower democracy in shared decision-making and build staff high relatedness (Serrini, 2018). Several impediments reported from Latvia studies, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey and Italy confirmed trusts and individualistic teaching culture to hinder the SLO transformation. To tackle these challenges, school leaders need to redesign flatter structure to empower team learning and shared decision-making with all school staff. Flatter structure will also reduce administrative work of reporting to different supervisors. Therefore, school leaders need to redesign a flatter structure for effective communication, team learning and shared decision-making which will support the practice of collaborative learning culture of all school staff.