Identifying the Components of Succession Planning in Iranian Public Universities

Universities and higher education institutions need formal succession planning to ensure the continuity of organizational leadership. The current research was conducted with the aim of identifying the components of succession planning in Iranian public universities.

In this research, the strategy of qualitative content analysis with a meta- synthesis approach was used in a documentary research framework. The statistical population is all the studies conducted in the time frame of 2017-2022. In this regard, the number of 1012 researches in the field of succession planning was evaluated and finally 28 articles were selected purposefully. Then, by analyzing the content and combining the literature related to the open, axial and selective coding method, in total, five dimensions and fourteen key components were selected and analyzed through the process of systematic search and combination, and its validity was confirmed through Cohen's kappa coefficient.

In the current research, the effective factors of succession planning of Iran's public universities were identified and categorized in five dimensions and 14 categories. The five dimensions were organizational, developmental, managerial, individual, and cultural. And the 14 categories consisted of processes, structural, evaluation, legal, human resource management, leadership, skill, personality, career, comprehensive training program, human resource development, foresight, university culture and public culture components.

The administrative and employment rules and regulations of Iran's public universities for faculty members and guest lecturers are determined based on the executive regulations and the approvals of the boards of trustees, and senior human resource manager’s don’t use a specific reference model for succession planning. They keep their old traditions regarding the removal and installation of managers and, in fact, they strongly resist the changes by ignoring the developmental needs of their professors and staff. Therefore, recent trends should be changed according to the new needs of human resources of universities. The current research provides a deep understanding of the existing literature in the field of succession planning in universities. In this context, managers of public universities and higher education institutions can use the results of this research and get familiar with the effective components of succession planning to create a collection of talented and skilled academic staff and potential scientific staff who can become the leaders of universities in the future.