Strategy adaptation for sustainable quality management in universities: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Despite its roots in environmental discussions, sustainability has become a critical term influencing every aspect of organisations. As human-oriented institutions, universities have also embraced the ‘sustainable development’ concept on the quality of their internal and external services. Two overarching questions are most important for university managers to strategically guide sustainable quality development in their institutions: Which strategies do university managers adapt to construct a “sustainable quality management” structure in their universities? and how are these adapted strategies related to different aspects/components of universities? In response, we employed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol to analyse the existing studies in the related literature. During the systematic review, we followed five steps sequentially: i) defining the research question(s), ii) setting inclusion–exclusion criteria, iii) recording eligible studies, iv) quality overview of selected studies, and v) discussing prominent results. To integrate the results, we benefitted from five enablers in the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) model and the sub-sections given in the European University Association’s (EUA) institutional evaluation reports. The results revealed that the initial steps for university leadership to establish a ‘Sustainable Quality Management’ system are integrating a sustainable quality approach to the main strategy document, and then motivating their staff to participate in and enrich the reform-level cultural changes in their universities. This study also discusses the strategies adapted to sustain quality development in universities’ teaching, research, societal services, and internationalisation practices.

Studies on Robotic Coding Education in Science Education: A Systematic Literature Review

“…These steps are; Formulating the research question(s), defining inclusion/exclusion criteria, recording relevant studies systematically, evaluating the quality of selected studies, integrating major findings. In other systematic literature review studies, same procedures have also been employed (Ozsen, 2022;Uslu, 2020).…”

The Sustainable Quality Management in China’s Private Higher Education: Developments and Challenges from ZY University

“…It is generally believed to be developed from scholarship on environmental problems and other related issues and arouses many attentions from both the public and professionals right from its very beginning. Typically, from 2015 and on, when the United Nations has announced its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 'sustainable development' has become a hot topic in the management of many organizations (Ozsen et al, 2022). As a humanity-and talent-oriented organization, higher education institutions have immediately followed up with the fashion of quality management and fully accepted the philosophy of "sustainability".…”

“…According to Ozsen et al (2022), sustainable quality management, to some extent, is to manage relevant departments and individuals effectively both inside and outside the organization, which means that all procedures of management and all activities in organization in terms of economy, community, environment, and value creation may be involved or included. Although the quality of higher education can be widely understood as the degree to which educational activities provided by higher education institutions align students' learning achievements with educational objectives, there are still different ideas and focuses on how to define quality, especially education quality (Niu & Wu, 2021).…”

“…Although the quality of higher education can be widely understood as the degree to which educational activities provided by higher education institutions align students' learning achievements with educational objectives, there are still different ideas and focuses on how to define quality, especially education quality (Niu & Wu, 2021). Therefore, many researchers have begun to explore the practice of sustainable education and quality management from different perspectives, such as the development of teaching plans, the use of online education systems, the impact of campus life, and the satisfaction of teachers, students, and employers with educational practices (Ozsen et al, 2022), which have provided us diversity of ideas on sustainable education and quality management.…”

“…One of the notable principles that we can learn from TQM is the incorporation of "quality" and "sustainability". According to Ozsen et al (2022), TQM has successfully introduced the idea of "sustainability" into the scope of quality management in education studies and incorporated them together into the theoretical and practical explorations of today's education. Just as Niu and Wu (2021) have indicated, with the evolution of business quality culture and its inspirations to the research of education quality system, higher education quality management is going through a new stage from previous focus on passive control under internal and external evaluations to active management in cultivating internal quality culture, which brings us new ideas of the construction and development of higher education quality [1][2][3][4].…”