Exploring the Innovative Personality Characteristics among Teachers

The aim of this study is to explore the characteristics of innovative personality among teachers in Malaysia. Samples of the research were randomly selected among secondary school teachers in three districts in Malaysia. Research instrument was self-developed by the researchers based on interviews carried out with some resource persons who are both experts and authoritative in their fields, as well as through literature review. A pilot study was carried out among 30 respondents. Cronbach’s Alpha value for the whole instrument is .952, indicating that it is reliable and suitable for actual data collection. A total of 484 sets of questionnaires were completed and gathered to form the data for this research. The data were then analysed using an advanced statistical method called Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Findings of the research concluded three constructs, namely, Leadership, Openness and Braveness. The constructs were labelled based on groups of items which were formed as a result of the PCA analysis. Meanwhile, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to validate each dimension and to analyse the coherence of data based on model hypothesis. The findings of CFA indicated the goodness-of-fit values of the revised model, as follows: CMIN/DF=2.56; CFI=.935; and RMSEA=.057; with each figure above the threshold value.


Introduction
One of the Malaysian government's main agendas is to develop world-class education system.However, the government is facing many challenges especially in handling the issue of unemployment among graduates.Thus, the government needs to focus on the aspect of dynamic and innovative human capital in enhancing its resilience and economic progress, as well as developing a community with exemplary values.This can be seen in the New Economic Model, which is based on innovation and productivity enrichment.
In 2011, the Malaysian Ministry of Education announced the National Higher Education Strategic Plan which plays a very important role in transforming Malaysia into a developed country with high income, highly competitive and innovative minded citizens.In relation to this plan, another plan, i.e.Innovative Human Capital Strategic Plan at Tertiary Level, was also announced by Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) in the same year.
The purpose of this five-year plan is to reduce the current innovation gap by creating a conducive innovative ecosystem and commercialise new findings.Prior to that, the Malaysian government focused on developing creative, dynamic and innovative human capital in the 10 th Malaysian Plan as one of the cores in the nation's transformation strategies in achieving its vision to become a fully developed country by the year 2020.The above initiatives will facilitate the development of a holistic personality through education (Othman & Mohamad, 2014).
Incentives such as increased facilities and financial allocation have been given to the education sector to produce innovative human capital starting from school to tertiary institutions.Through these initiatives, students are hope to be able to face more practical and competitive situations while teachers are trained to lead and manage their students to become more innovative in their teaching and learning sessions.
In order to shape the quality of an individual, focus was given to the aspect of innovative personality in producing the best and valuable product, system and service.This effort can be seen in the ongoing national innovation strategy and higher education's strategic plan in developing innovative human capital to increase the nation's economy.Innovation is a chain to enhance the economic value to a higher level.The Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Abd Razak, announced the year 2012 as the National Innovation Movement year, in which one of the agendas was to restructure the strategies in transforming research and development products into ones with high commercial value via research institutions.
Nonetheless, do personnel characteristics and cultural values that promote innovation, quality and efficiency compete or complement each other?Ella, Mirriam and Eitan (2004) raised this question in their research to test if the personnel characteristics could enhance innovativeness and contribute to quality improvement.In their research entitled 'How leaders influence employees' innovative behaviour?',Jereon and Deanne (2007) studied leaders' attitude in encouraging their employees to practice innovativeness in idea generation and implementation.A number of researches support the views that innovative individuals contribute to the success of any organisation (see for example, Van de Ven, 1986;Amabile, 1988;Axtell et al., 2000;Smith, 2002;Unsworth & Parker, 2003).
In the context of this research, innovative personality refers to the capability of the human resource to invent a new or better product or service in fulfilling the needs and demands of the society.According to Prather (2010), innovation depends heavily on the environmental factors that help innovation and the ones that can squash it.He developed a model namely, "Innovation Competence Model".There are three arenas of the competence model: education about the principles, tools, and techniques to solve critical business problems; and leadership in the workplace to enable innovation.He further argued that total leadership commitment from the top is the single most important factor in a company's level of innovation competence and its innovation success.Thus, based on this idea, the researcher has included leadership as one of the important characteristics in innovative personality profile.This idea is also supported by Gailly (2011).According to Hammond (2012), Forbes Insights study reveals five personality types that drive innovation.The study was based on a survey of 1245 executives in Europe, included a series of questions about the executives' attitudes, beliefs, priorities and behaviors.One of personality types is movers and shakers in which these refer to the leaders.These are the ones who like being in front, driving projects forward and push to get things done.
Braveness gives someone a high level of confidence in completing any task given to him or her.The ability to give creative ideas is also associated with braveness (Lee & Choi, 2003).Innovation needs braveness in creating and producing something new and different (Gailly, 2011).Another important characteristic is openness.
Openness refers to open-minded people who are proactive and diverse in thinking.According to Foley (2014), diversity is good for innovation for it brings different perspectives, experiences and point of references.The 'Big Five' is seen to have the most scientific support from the world of psychology, in which sometimes called the OCEAN model.One of the aspects is openess that is openness to new ideas and to promote innovative and diverse thinking (Foley, 2014).
Thus, this study aimed to explore innovative personality characteristics among secondary school teachers in Malaysia by answering the following research questions: 1) What are the underlying constructs of the profile for innovative personality characteristics among teachers?
2) Is the profile valid and reliable?

Respondents
The respondents are secondary school teachers selected from daily and boarding schools.They were randomly chosen from the three states in Peninsular Malaysia, namely, Johor (38.2% or 185 respondents), Kuala Lumpur (29.5% or 143 respondents) and Terengganu (32.2% or 156 respondents).

Instrument and Sample
The research instrument used in this research was self-developed by the researchers.There are two parts: Part A, which is related to respondents' demographic data; and Part B which contains 47 items related to innovative personality characteristics.Initially, based on literature review, there are nine important characteristics listed in innovative personality profile.After some discussions and revisions, the researcher agrees that there will be only four main characteristics that can be trained and developed.These characteristics were transformed into questionnaire items.PCA was run at the pilot testing stage.The final instrument was left with only three constructs consisted of 47 clean items.
Using PCA, the sample size goes according to the number of items in the instrument.Based on the rule of thumb, the minimum size must be at least five respondents for each item (Hair et al., 1998).Out of a total of 600 questionnaires distributed to the identified respondents, 484 completed questionnaires were collected and this number fulfilled the requirement of this study, which included the use of CFA for data analysis.

Data Analysis
The collected data were analysed using PCA.PCA was used to identify the underlying constructs of the profile.The reliability of each construct was based on the value of Cronbach's Alpha.The analysis was done during the pilot testing prior to the real data collection.Then, the constructs generated by PCA were confirmed using CFA.CFA was used to test the reliability and validity of the constructs.For the purpose of data analysis, SPSS version 20.0 and AMOS version 20.0 were used.

Demography
In this study, the number of female respondents is higher (71.9% or 348 respondents) than the male respondents (28.1% or 136 respondents).Looking at the ethnic data, majority of the respondents are Malay (484 respondents or 91.5%), followed by Chinese (24 respondents or 5.0%), Indians (14 respondents) and finally 3 respondents from other races.Meanwhile, analysis on the respondents' age showed that 47.1% of them were in the age group of 20-30 years, followed by 18% in the age group of 31-40 years and 2.5% in the group of 51-60 years at the time of the study.Majority of them are first degree holders (68%), followed by 28.1% of those with a master degree, and only 0.4% are PhD holders.

Constructs Development Using PCA
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the number of items in the profile by generating the underlying constructs or factors.In this case, a profile of innovative personality characteristics would be developed.In order to determine the number of factors to retain, 4 criteria were used: i.The presence of correlation with the other resulting factors (Bartlett's test, KMO, & MSA) ii. Factors with Eigen values greater than 1.0 iii.The value of factor loading for each variable is greater than 0.4 iv.A minimum of 4 items are loaded for each factor

Profile Constructs
The Bartlett's test was significant, where χ 2 (231) = 3324.23,ρ = .00.The overall measure of sampling adequacy (KMO) is .92.This result shows the correlation between the items and it also supports the use of principle component analysis in this study.Meanwhile, measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) for each items shows that all values are greater than .80.
The Principal Component Analysis showed that there were three constructs generated by the data with Eigen values more than 1.0, accounting for 50% of the total variance explained.This result indicates three underlying constructs have explained more than 50% of the variance among the 22 variables in the profile.Meanwhile, 3 items were dropped due to their threshold values which are below .4.The factor loadings for each construct, as generated by PCA, are shown in Table 1 below.
Based on the contents of the items, construct 1 was labelled as Leadership (7 items).These items show the characteristics of those who can manage, motivate and contribute to the development of others.Factor 2 was labelled as Openness (6 items).These items show the characteristics of those who are open-minded in managing matters related to themselves and other people such as the ability to think outside the box and their preparedness in giving time and support to new ideas.Factor 3 was labelled as Braveness (6 items).These items represent those who are capable of making decisions, have high confidence and are brave enough to share their views and opinions.Those people have high motivation and are receptive to comments and critics.

Constructs Validation Using CFA
In this study, first-order CFA was used.The hypothesized model is also known as measurement model and it consists of three constructs, namely, leadership, openness and braveness.

Assessing Adequacy of the Hypothesized Model
The hypothesized model was tested and the findings showed that the chi-square test for the overall model fit is χ 2 (132) = 311.23,ρ = .00.Due to the large sample size and the fact that it is known that ρ-value is very sensitive to the sample size, the ρ-value could not be used to measure the good-fit of this model.The results of the analysis on the overall fit of the model indicate that the model cannot be rejected.The fit indicator, CFI, exceeds the threshold of .90.The ratio of the minimum discrepancy to its degree of freedom (CMIN/df) is 2.36 and this is between the accepted value of between 2 and 5.The root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) is .053,which is just within the acceptable value of .08.Thus, the fit of the data to the hypothesized model is considered as adequate.The hypothesized model is shown in Figure 1

Discuss
The first c related to teacher so influencing academic lives.Teachers are responsible to educating their students in academic aspects and developing the innovative culture among them.Without an innovative teacher, it is difficult to expect the birth of an innovative generation.It is obviously important for the teachers to equip themselves with the necessary skills.Thus, the development of this profile will assist teachers and educators alike to understand the innovative characteristics and develop their personality parallel to these characteristics in order to produce innovative students as future innovative citizens.
The Ministry of Education, through higher education institutions, needs to have a specific teachers training programme in developing teaching skill and instilling innovative characteristics among the students.This profile is able to give input to the ministry in developing and strengthening teachers in shaping innovative and competitive human capital.
Innovativeness needs someone to act or to do something outside the normal thinking framework.In this context, leadership is one of the cores in moving the initiative in creating the innovative culture.Openness can make every party concerned learn new things and assess the best approach to instilling the said culture.Meanwhile, braveness is the motivating factor in making changes and looking things from different perspectives.It is the combination of these characteristics that will eventually help to develop innovative human capital. Figure

Table 1 .
Factor loadings for each construct/ factor generated by PCA innovative teachers in order to produce innovative students.