The Process of Institution Governance and Decision Making - Research Paper Example

The process of institutional governance and decision making is dependent on how the authority is distributed amongst the administration under the legal rights and obligation. This ultimately trickles down to the organizational behaviour of the members of the institute, which is unfolded into what direction the institute adopts by unfolding its strategies that impact all the stakeholders. One of the solutions to avoid the conflict amongst different stakeholder groups by the board of the higher academic institute is by provisioning of ‘shared governance’, which allows representation of views of all the stakeholders that are affected by the decision making process.

This happens because each stakeholder group provides the views and inputs related to their interest in the decision-making process of the board. Faculty, student groups, members of the alumni, members of the board of trustees, founder members, investors etc. are all provided with a chance to share their views in setting up a strategy by the board for the future of the institute. Rivera (2008) pointed out that shared governance is the process of involving many different actors in making decisions or choosing outcome direction that serves the best interest of the whole.

But this has also been criticized by many schools of thought since it is believed that institutions are to be managed like corporations. Hence applications of concepts such as delegation of authority, a division of autonomy and negotiations form part of how the decisions unroll and who has the advantage in terms of higher bargaining power.