The Role of Strategic Vigilance as an Entrance to Achieving the Strategic Leadership in Saudi Universities

: The study aimed to reveal the strategic vigilance’s impact in Saudi universities through its dimensions: (competitive vigilance, technological vigilance). The descriptive analytical approach was used in this research


Introduction
The university is the basis for the advancement and advancement of societies because it is a beacon of science, civilization, and culture.The university is closely linked to society, and this is evident in the roles that the university plays in serving the community.Therefore, by performing the function of teaching, the university is based on the purpose of culture and science between generations, and in performing the function of scientific research, it is working to solve societal problems.Hence, these two functions contribute to community service and development, and are a reason for the progress and advancement of society.In recent decades, the university's function of community service and its strategic pioneering orientation in performing its mission has emerged alongside the functions of teaching and scientific research.
It should be noted that universities have begun to move towards achieving and connecting to the requirements of strategic leadership by employing modern management mechanisms represented in strategic vigilance.(Cristo-Andrade & Ferreira, 2020, p268).Accordingly, strategic leadership is considered a group of opportunities that universities are trying to obtain and also a group of opportunities that the administration is trying to realize and exploit, and therefore it is an entrance to the development of universities and through which innovation is adopted and disseminated at all administrative levels (Asali & Sakour, 2022, p475).
It is worth noting that strategic leadership focuses on the practices undertaken by universities in order to invest in new innovations that arise in their attempts to discover new opportunities.These practices address actions that a project takes to implement new innovations that arise as it seeks to realize new opportunities, as well as take leadership actions with a strategic perspective (Bettahar & Aggoun, 2021, p112).Thus, strategic vigilance combines the concept of leadership as practices aimed at searching for opportunities, and the concept of strategic leadership as practices aimed at excellence and seeks to achieve performance development (Karima & Zohra, 2021, p209).
On the other hand, strategic vigilance is a continuous procedure carried out by universities to collect information and data related to their overall environment and use them to know the changes that will occur in this environment (Amayreh, 2021.This, of course, helps to take precautions to take advantage of opportunities or face threats, as it is an ongoing collective process carried out by a group of individuals in a voluntary manner (Yanez et al, 2019, p59).
It is worth noting that the vigilance system combines two complementary methods: warning and follow-up.Warning alerts officials to new phenomena, and follow-up allows tracking developments.The role of strategic vigilance can be summarized in four functions, represented in anticipating the activity of competitors and changes in the environment, and secondly, discovering new or expected competitors, and then monitoring developments in the presentation of products in the market and developments in technology or production methods that affect or target activity and organizations that change the framework of activity and finally, learning the advantages of development and modernization in the standards on which universities are based (El-Far, 2022, p201).
Proceeding from the foregoing, the search for knowledge of the role of strategic vigilance as an entry point for achieving strategic leadership in Saudi universities and in accordance with international standards adopted by international universities, and the progress and development of institutional performance and strategic leadership that is presented on the competitive and technological scene has its justifications.Among these justifications are the policies put forward on the Saudi educational scene related to the need to develop and modernize the university institution; So that its outputs become capable of creativity, innovation and keeping pace with scientific and technological developments, and thus able to contribute to achieving strategic leadership.

Problem of the study
Educational institutions are transforming fundamentally to keep pace with the requirements of the times and to achieve more quality in performance, institutional excellence, and global competition.Therefore, this cannot be achieved without employing mechanisms that contribute to achieving strategic leadership by creating models that help in decision-making and analysis of the scientific, technical, and technological environment and development opportunities.
Yanez et al (2019) indicated that the dynamic environment and uncertainty within which universities operate is facing a range of challenges and difficulties.In this context, Schoemaker & Day (2020) indicated that there are many variable factors that contributed to increasing global competition for access to innovation and creativity, and this in turn imposed on universities the need to actively follow these variables and exercise strategic vigilance with their pioneering directions and strategic aspirations.
It should be noted that previous studies emphasized the importance of strategic vigilance and its role in strategic leadership in universities in terms of excellence in institutional performance and as an entry point for achieving competitive advantage, and as an entry point for improving competitive performance.Accordingly, Al-Zuhairi's study (2018) indicated that strategic vigilance is of great importance in universities, as the study relied on "Kaizen" applications, which are based on the principle that there is always an opportunity for improvement and development.Al-Ghamdi study (2021) also showed that the strategic leadership in education administrations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has generally reached a "medium" degree.This is one of the justifications that support conducting this study to show the mechanism of defects in the processes of applying new models that may contribute to achieving a high degree of strategic leadership.
The El-Far study (2022) also analyzed the internal and external environment and identified the most important requirements for strategic vigilance represented in leadership skills, organizational restructuring, in addition to supporting decision-making.In the same context, the results of Ali (2020) study indicated that there is a clear role for strategic leadership as an entry point for achieving sustainable competitive advantage in universities.
The researcher noted, as a result of her briefing and investigation, that she works in Saudi universities, that there may be risks and challenges facing universities as a result of the development of administrative methods.This may reflect negatively on the ability of universities to implement their leadership orientations and adopt the philosophy of institutional excellence, which qualifies them to adopt strategies of leadership orientations that positively affect their performance.Given the importance of strategic vigilance in promoting leadership trends, it was necessary for the researcher to address the role of strategic vigilance on strategic leadership in Saudi universities.After reviewing previous studies, it was found that researchers and educators are interested in developing education and improving the performance of its institutions.However, according to the researcher's knowledge, there is no Arab or foreign scientific study that linked the two variables of the study (strategic vigilance and strategic leadership) or that it sought to discover the role between them in Saudi universities.
This stimulated the researcher's motivation to conduct this study.Accordingly, this study seeks to search in an extensive and accurate manner to demonstrate the role of strategic vigilance as an entry point to achieving strategic leadership, this leads to the following: What is the role of strategic vigilance as an entrance to achieving strategic leadership in Saudi universities?
Objectives of the study 1-Understanding how strategic vigilance affect Saudi universities considering: competitive vigilance and technological vigilance dimensions.2-Presenting a set of proposals and recommendations to Saudi universities and researchers, which could enhance their leadership orientation.

Hypotheses:
The main null hypothesis (H0): At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation to apply the role of strategic vigilance with its dimensions (competitive vigilance, technological vigilance) as an entrance to achieving strategic leadership in Saudi universities.Accordingly, we can assume: 1. (H0-1): At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation for the dimension of competitive vigilance to achieve strategic leadership for Saudi universities.2. (H0-2): At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation for the dimension of technological vigilance to achieve the strategic leadership of Saudi universities.

Importance of Study:
The importance of the study is represented in revealing the impact of strategic vigilance on strategic leadership.The importance of the study also stems from shedding light on competitive vigilance, and technological vigilance, and indicating the level of strategic leadership in Saudi universities and the extent to which they achieve entrepreneurial orientation and achieve institutional performance.

Study Model:
In order to accomplish the study's goals, the following study model was built as shown in Figure No. (1):

Strategic vigilance:
It is the process that is characterized by continuity and change in order to track the internal and external environment of the institutions in order to collect information about possible changes in them; in order to discover opportunities and reduce risks associated with the institution's leadership orientations according to an organized method in strategic management (Abu Aziz et al, 2022, p151) It is also "the action undertaken by a group of people by collecting and analyzing information voluntarily and proactively to adapt to potential changes in the external environment, to reduce risks, threats and build new opportunities (Karima & Zohra, 2021, p212).Yeşilkaya & Yıldız (2022) defined it as

Dependent variable
Strategic leadership a continual process where possibilities, risks, and ways to prevent and lessen their consequences are all discovered while the surroundings is tracked and examined.(p122) Procedurally it is "an activity or process that helps universities to be constantly informed of all possible and potential changes in their internal and external environment, through continuous and intelligent monitoring of the institution with its technological, competitive, commercial and environmental dimensions, in order to anticipate changes and reach the best decisions, which helps to seize opportunities, avoid threats and risks, a after which the educational establishments will have an advantage in the market.

Strategic leadership:
It is the set of leadership operations that are implemented according to the strategic perspective (Morici & Zander, 2022, p449).
Procedurally: they are characteristics and behaviors related to starting work and planning for it, taking risks and being creative in its management, and the leader is the one who has a broad and far vision, predicts the future and works to achieve it, and has flexibility, perseverance, and perseverance in work.

Methodology of Study:
Due to its applicability to the current study's nature, the descriptive analytical approach was used in order to accomplish the study's goals.The researcher will describe what exists, understand the surrounding phenomena, elicit relationships between them, and analyze the dimensions of the problem under study.The descriptive-analytical method is concerned with interrogating a large sample of society to reach the studied phenomenon in terms of its nature and degree of existence.The descriptive method is dependent on studying the event as it actually occurs and is preoccupied with precisely characterizing it using the right scientific methods, and depicting the results reached on expressive digital forms that can be interpreted (Mahmoudi, 2019, p201).This approach is also applied on a large or small geographic scale, and it may be a comprehensive survey or a sampling method, and in most cases large samples are used in order to help the researcher obtain accurate results with low error rates.And thus, enabling the researcher to generalize his results to the study community, and it also describes the phenomenon that he supports studying either quantitatively or qualitatively (Al-Mandalawi, 2016, p8).As Bauer et al (2021) pointed out, in quantitative research, the researcher chooses a research question which keeps up with the latest in the profession or the requirement to provide an explanation for a specific event.By analyzing the direction, it is meant that the research problem can be more effectively addressed through a study in which the researcher aims to identify the overall pattern of respondents' responses and observes how this pattern varies across respondents.(p49)

Sample
The study population is "each of the phenomena' subjects which are investigated, and thus the study population is all the individuals or things who are the subject of a problem (Roni & Djajadikerta, 2021, p77).Accordingly, the current study population consists of faculty members in three universities (Hail value is less than (1) and higher than (3), this indicates the existence of a self-correlation.Table (4) shows that the values of Drain and Watson, according to the hypotheses of the study, were not less than (1) and not higher than (3), which indicates that the data is free from this phenomenon studied.The researcher used SPSS to obtain the results

Hypothesis test
The researcher utilized the simple linear test to evaluate the sub-null hypotheses and the multiple linear regression test to evaluate the main hypothesis.The results were as follows: H0: At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation to apply the role of strategic vigilance with its dimensions (competitive vigilance, technological vigilance) as an entrance to achieving strategic leadership in Saudi universities.
Multiple linear regression was employed to examine the viability of the hypothesis, and the outcomes were as follows: It is clear from the data of Table ( 5) that there is a strong direct correlation, where the Pearson correlation coefficient is (0.767).According to the value of the coefficient of determination (R2) = 0.738, the strategic vigilance components contributed to explaining about 64.7% of the variation.
Looking at the coefficients table, it appears that the value of (B) was (0.464) at the calculated (t) value of (6.386) and with a value of statistical significance (0.05).According to the previous data, an increase of one degree is followed by an increase in the variable by (0.464) degrees.Therefore, we accept the alternative hypothesis rather than the null hypothesis since it states that: At (0.05) level of significance, there is strong positive correlation to apply the role of strategic vigilance with its dimensions (competitive vigilance, technological vigilance) as an entrance to achieving strategic leadership in Saudi universities.
(H0-1): At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation for the dimension of competitive vigilance to achieve strategic leadership for Saudi universities.
Multiple linear regression was employed to examine the viability of the hypothesis, and the outcomes were as follows: It is clear from the data in Table (6) that there is a strong direct correlation to the dimension of competitive vigilance, where the Pearson correlation coefficient was (0.738), the coefficient of determination's value was (R2) = 0.574, which indicates that the dimension of competitive vigilance contributed to an explanation of (61.3%) of the variance.The coefficients table also shows that the value of (B) for the dimension of competitive vigilance was (0.683) at the calculated (t) value (12.842) and with a value of statistical significance (0.05).The significance of this effect is confirmed by the calculated (F) value, whose value was (198.866) and with statistical significance (0.05).It is under the level of statistical significance (0.05).Therefore, we accept the alternative hypothesis rather than the null hypothesis since it states that: At (0.05) level of significance, there is strong positive correlation for the dimension of competitive vigilance to achieve strategic leadership for Saudi universities.
(H0-2): At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation for the dimension of technological vigilance to achieve the strategic leadership of Saudi universities.
Multiple linear regression was employed to examine the viability of the hypothesis, and the outcomes were as follows: It is clear from the data in Table (7) that there is a strong direct correlation to the dimension of technological vigilance, where the Pearson correlation coefficient reached (0.762), and the coefficient of determination's value was (R2) = 0.538, which indicates that technological vigilance contributed to an explanation of (58.6%) of the variance.The coefficients table clarifies that the value of (B) for the dimension of technological vigilance was (0.621) at the calculated (t) value (14.591) and with a value of statistical significance (0.05).The significance of this effect is confirmed by the calculated (F) value, whose value was (186.629) and with statistical significance (0.05).It is less than the level of statistical significance (0.05).Therefore, we accept the alternative hypothesis rather than the null hypothesis since it states that: At (0.05) level of significance, there is strong positive correlation for the dimension of technological vigilance to achieve the strategic leadership of Saudi universities.

Results and Discussion
1.At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation to apply the role of strategic vigilance with its dimensions (competitive vigilance, technological vigilance) as an entrance to achieving strategic leadership in Saudi universities.2. At (0.05) level of significance, there isn't any strong positive correlation for the dimension of competitive vigilance to achieve strategic leadership for Saudi universities.3.At (0.05) level of significance, there is strong positive correlation for the dimension of technological vigilance to achieve the strategic leadership of Saudi universities.Through the previous results resulting from statistical analysis procedures, and hypothesis testing, it was found that there is a role for strategic vigilance with its dimensions (competitive vigilance, technological vigilance) as an entrance to achieving strategic leadership in Saudi universities.The researcher attributes this result to the fact that the dynamic environment Saudi universities adopted the principle of strategic leadership, with the aim of increasing global competition to reach innovation and creativity.And this, in turn, imposed on universities the necessity of actively following up on these variables and exercising strategic vigilance with their pioneering orientations and strategic aspirations.This result also explains that Saudi universities sought to improve and develop by analyzing the internal and external environment and identifying the most important requirements for strategic vigilance represented in leadership skills, organizational restructuring, in addition to supporting decision-making.

Recommendations
1. Possessing convictions of the importance of pioneering and strategic thinking and employing them in Saudi universities.2. Possessing the ability to analyze the external and internal environment of Saudi universities in line with the requirements of strategic vigilance.3. Seeking to explore unavailable opportunities in the mechanisms and requirements of strategic leadership thought so that Saudi universities can reach competition with international universities.4. Working according to a clear and specific vision based on pioneering and strategic thought.5. Enhancing innovation and creativity among faculty members in Saudi universities.