The views of administrators and academic staff about the innovativeness and risk-taking behaviors of university administrators

Abstract

In today's world of rapid technical and scientific advancements, the organizations that are open to adopt innovations and take risks will have more chance to achieve success. Universities, as the organizations of producing and spreading knowledge, should be the leader of making innovations and following it up. The university administrators' point of view on innovations and risk taking has a very important role during the process of being the leader of social innovation. In this study, it is aimed to state the point of views of university administrators and instructors on how much it is achieved to succeed in having an innovative point of view and taking risks. The differences between the views of instructors are evaluated according to their sex, seniority and academic title. The paradigm of this study is constituted by volunteer university administrators and instructors of Karadeniz Technical University. "The Scale of Innovativeness and Risk Taking" is used in this study. As a conclusion, it is found that academic staff evaluated the innovativeness and risk-taking behaviors of administrators as "sometimes", while administrators, themselves, indicated their own innovative and risk-taking behaviors as "most of the time".