A university is a place that generates new ideas and also covers the entire universe of knowledge. For higher education numerous learning and teaching strategies are available and provide effective learning and teaching outcomes. Interaction between teachers and education managers is crucial in understanding how universities develop new and innovative pedagogy. In order to change their work environments, teachers must be innovative and open to applying new ideas and opportunities.

In this paper, we suggest that university teachers can be innovative by sharing their insights and knowledge on teaching with their colleagues and peers. Pedagogical development is theorized here based on the concepts of Innovative Work Behaviour (IWB), co-worker exchange (CWX) and leader-member exchange (CMX). IWB can be defined as the intentional generation, promotion and realization of new ideas within a work role, workgroup or organization. IWB consists of opportunity exploration, idea generation, championing and application. Co-worker exchange refers to the quality of relationships between teachers in university. The leader member exchange (LMX) theory suggests that superiors distribute their resources unequally to their subordinates, hence leading to some group members being more powerful in the work group. As a trickle-down effect, some members have more control over the task accomplishment than others. Hence, co-worker exchange is affected also by the quality of interaction between leaders and members of the group.

In this study we explore how Innovative Work Behaviour (IWB) and co-worker exchange (CWX) are practiced in two university medical faculties in Albania and Finland. We suggest that high levels of Innovative Work Behaviour and Co-worker exchange lead to improved teaching practices. We aim to discover and describe best practices among four teams at faculty or department level in two universities.

The teams will be selected by purposive sampling, aiming for maximum variation where possible. They are known for their interest in and openness to pedagogical development. The selected samples represent two presumably different cultural traditions. Albania and Finland differ greatly in the Hofstede's six dimensions of national culture (Hofstede Insights 2018). They can be seen as the two extremes of the aforementioned six-dimensional model of European national cultures. The diverse cultural contexts provide us with the possibility to study whether cooperative communication between group members and between leaders and members of the group differ in the two countries. This study will inform the academic community as to how pedagogical development in medical faculty teaching and learning is affected by co-worker exchange and innovative work behaviour. The national differences make the results applicable for a wider range of cultures and contexts.

Keywords: medical faculty teaching, co-worker exchange, leader-member exchange, innovative work behaviour, pedagogical development