Abstrait

Re-conceptualizing the Importance of Healthy Collaborative Cultures and Commitment within Schools and between Schools and School Communities in Namibia

Nelson Antonio

Quality service delivery in organizations is realized by virtue of healthy collaborative cultures and commitment that enhances teaching and learning. Establishing a healthy collaborative culture and commitments in schools forms the basis of all management tasks, and is the first and most important step of all management actions to be undertaken by school principal. Healthy collaborative cultures and commitments go hand in hand with employee’s job happiness and play a crucial role on organizational performance. In educational institutions, school managers, teachers, school board members, school community along with learner representative councils are the most important human resource needed to activate and convert the other more passive resources into need satisfying goods and services. In general, these stake holders are regarded as an unsurpassed vital resource of any organization, thus, the issue of creating a healthy collaborative culture and commitment among these stake holders has become an indispensable part of the human resource strategy. This qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology approach aims to establish the importance of a healthy collaborative culture and commitment in schools and its relevance to the organizational effectiveness and efficiency. This project interviewed various stake holders in the Khomas region in order to acquire in-depth information regarding the impact of a healthy collaborative culture and commitment in schools. This paper reveals that happy employees and other stake holders may demonstrate a good standard of performance and produce work of high quality. Furthermore, this paper posits that executing fair managerial practices and implementing stress management programs may assist stake holders to be more adaptive and receptive to job demands and improve work engagement which has a positive impact on classroom and leadership practice. Furthermore, this paper concludes that since leaders cannot be successful in isolation, a healthy culture of collaborativeness and commitment in schools is essential to the task at hand, hence, by means of motivation, stake holders will be bound to the school, without wanting to quit their roles and the school.
Indisputably, this in itself is a driving force that enhances employee’s self-efficacy, learning and job happiness that may encourage high work engagement and hard work that leads to a positive impact towards school performance.