Barriers of organizational inclusion: A study among academics in Egyptian public business schools

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Human resources management and organization studies. This paper investigates the main barriers of organizational inclusion practices of academics in Egyptian higher education institutions, and proposes interventions to enhance academics’ sense of organizational inclusion. METHODS: A total of 350 academics were contacted and 245 of them were interviewed in 49 face-to-face focus groups. The interview length for each focus group is about 45 minutes and is conducted in Arabic, the mother tongue of all respondents. Upon conducting the interviews, the authors used thematic analysis to determine the main ideas in the transcripts. RESULTS: After carefully analyzing the interviews, the authors of this paper could not identify any adoptable paradigm for the systematic practice of organizational inclusion experienced by academics in the chosen business schools. Moreover, the authors of the present paper have explored some barriers hindering the sense of organizational inclusion among academics and subsequently classified them as cultural, functional and psychological barriers. CONCLUSION: The authors propose three prompt managerial interventions for Egyptian public business schools. The first is economic, and proposes a link be created between the financial remuneration of professors and the number of academic theses they supervise. The second is functional, and strongly recommends that units be created for managing foreign educational grants and scholarships. The third is cultural, and proposes that cultural tolerance units be required to manage any discriminatory and unequal opportunity claims. This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management in the higher education sector, in which empirical studies on the practices of organizational inclusion have been limited so far.

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