Authoritative Structures and its Implications for Decision Making in Uganda’s University Sector

Abstract

This study examined the perceived effect between authoritative structures in bureaucratic governance and decision making in public and private universities in Uganda. We adopted the descriptive research design with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The target population will include the 100 members of the Governing Councils of Universities, 100 Members of Senate and 10 Vice Chancellors of Universities in central region of Uganda, 2290 teaching and 2000 non-teaching staff, 300 student leaders and 200 opinion leaders around the universities. From the population of study given above and in accordance with the Sloven Formula (1967) the sample size of the study was 357 respondents. The sampling was done using stratified, purposive and snowball sampling methods. We analyzed the data collected using descriptive and inferential statistics in order to establish the effect of authoritative structures on decision making in public and private universities. We found out that there was correlation index for the relationship between decision making and authoritative structure is 0.589 which is between 0.4-0.7. This implies that there is a moderate positive relationship between decision making and authoritative structure. Furthermore, there is a positive effect of authoritative structure on decision making – a unit increase in authoritative structure brings about 13.1% changes in decision making. Furthermore the results indicate r2=0.3469, which suggests authoritative structure explains 34.7% variations in decision making. This implies that 65.3% variations decisions making are explained by other factors other than authoritative structure. We therefore recommend that private universities should endeavour to adopt and use authoritative structures just like the public universities which need to be encouraged to continue using authoritative structures to improve on decision-making in their management process.