Succession Planning Strategy for Non-Academic Staff at Malaysian Public Universities

Today’s successful organizations realize on the important of strong key position to maintain and sustain long-term productivity. In a time when the competition for top talent increases, many organizations have developed strategic succession planning process to ensure their organizations will be well positioned to compete in the long-term. Besides, Higher education will face similar challenges as those who have led for years leave their institutions. This quantitative research aimed to identify the nature and characteristics of succession planning, to determine the relationship between the degree of clarity of the concept of succession planning and the implementation of succession planning and to identify the relationship between managerial support towards succession planning and the implementation of succession planning among non-academic staff at one of public university in Malaysia. Quantitative research method is practiced in this research. The questionnaire, 5 point Likert scale has been used to collect the data. Hence, the research sample is composed of 55 non-academic staff from Grade N41 to N54. Nevertheless, 46 of the completed questionnaires were received, producing a 92 per cent response rate for this study. The finding revealed that managerial support towards succession planning had overall highest mean values from the respondents, while the degree of the clarity of the concept and implementation of succession planning had moderate mean values from the respondents. There is a significant positive relationship between the degree of clarity of the concept and implementation succession planning. Likewise, there is a significant positive relationship between managerial support and implementation of succession planning. Moreover, implications of the findings, suggestions for future studies and recommendations for proactive implementation and action to be taken were also presented.