Strategic leadership towards strategic leadership towards sustainable development in higher education using the developed interpretive structural modelling

In order to move toward sustainability, society needs an increasingly constructive transition on sustainable societal development between scientists and decision-makers to create synergies and develop new solutions. Sustainable development is not just obligating society members to fulfill their responsibilities, but can also generate significant competitive advantage via improvement of sustainable societal patterns and the creation of a new set of visions, paradigms, and applicable procedures. Customer relationship management has become the key strategic tool for all organizations, especially in the current competitive environment. Applying this strategic tool in academia as engines of creating human capital that is needed to support sustainable development, has led to a new concept named student relationship management. The methodology of employing the customer relationship management as a strategic leadership, addressed to identify the indicators with exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis based on literature and in consultation with academicians to implement the student relationship management model through interpretive structural modeling. At its core, the proposed methodology utilizes a pilot study with 151 students to reveal initial factors underpinning the structure as well as five expert judgments to assess the mutual influences amongst the factors listed in the questionnaire. Results of factor analysis identified the six-factor structure of the instrument which assessed 1) Knowledge Acquisition, 2) SRM Technology, 3) Knowledge Diffusion, 4) Student Orientation, 5) SRM Results, and 6) Employee’s Involvement. Following on from interpretive structural modeling, knowledge management was found as a foundation for the implementation of the system and these findings provide a helpful reference on how student relationship management could be linked to customer relationship management towards sustainable development in higher education at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia as well as for sustainability in universities more broadly throughout Malaysia and other parts of the world