Competency Factors Of B-School Teachers In Kolkata

Human Competencies are becoming a frequently-used and written-about vehicle for organizational applications. It is also obvious that for the growth and development of organization there is a need to identify the competencies required to perform successfully a given job or role or a set of tasks at a given point of time or in other words mapping of competency. Academic departments operate largely in an informational vacuum when it comes to knowledge about the standards, staffing practices, resources, research expectations, and so forth of departments in their discipline. Apart from that the change in patterns of education governance is not complete, and is uncertain of outcome. Also, that additional pressure for education standards has come from the public interest and industry requirement in overall higher achievement. In view with this, in present study core competency areas for the postgraduate B-School teachers were considered for subject of investigation. Core competency factors were identified from literature survey and perception through free and open interaction with the final semester students of management. On the basis of those, Questionnaire was prepared and face validity was determined. Through judgment sampling faculty of different management schools were selected for primary data collection. It was found that Competency for teaching in B-school can be in two significant core areas viz. Experience and Job itself. This study will help the B-School management to develop their own procedures for selecting and determine the level of riders for generation of standard output by the B-school teachers.

1.    Introduction: Today organizations are all talking in terms of competence. Gone are those days when people used to talk in terms of skill sets or knowledge which would make their organizations competitive. There has been a shift in the focus of the organizations and now they believe in excelling and not competing. It is better to build a core competency that will see them not only through crisis but also for development.

Competencies are becoming a frequently-used and written-about vehicle for organizational applications such as:
•    Defining the factors for success in jobs (i.e., work) and work roles within the organization.
•    Assessing the current performance and future development needs of persons holding jobs and roles. 
•    Mapping succession possibilities for employees within the organization.
•    Assigning compensation grades and levels to particular jobs and roles.
•    Selecting applicants for open positions, using competency-based interviewing techniques.
•   
2.    Definition of Competency: According to Woodruffe (1991), the word Competency means “A person- related concept that refers to the dimensions of behavior lying behind competent performer”.


M Tech (Ceramic Engineering, University of Calcutta)
Lecturer, Institute of Business Management, The National Council of Education, Bengal, Jadavpur University.
The most recent definition given by Unido (2002), “A Competency is a set of skills, related knowledge and attributes that allow an individual to successfully perform a task or an activity within a specific function or job”.

Thus, the competency of an individual employee within an organizational setting is the combination of Knowledge, Attitude and Skills for a given job. Hence competency is linked to environmental as well as temporal factors. It is also obvious that for the growth and development of organization there is a need to identify the competencies required to perform successfully a given job or role or a set tasks at a given point of time or in other words mapping of competency.

3.    Reasons Why Competency Mapping Is Used:
•    Effectively match individual competencies to position, project team and job
    requirements.
•    Prioritize competencies by job, project, or position, and track individual’s  abilities to
    fulfill requirements.
•    Integrate training and administration applications to focus training efforts.
•    Run gap and match analysis between individuals, jobs, teams and positions.
•    Increase skill set to meet organization scope and growth
•    Lengthen the time that staff stay with a company by allowing staff member to
    discover individual career paths within the company.
•    Increase capacity by achieving a more holistic view of the accumulated competence
    of the entire organization.
•    Achieve access to appropriate competence at the right time and place.
•    Establish an overview of the accumulated resources of the organization and the
    demand for the resources.
•    Find candidates with the right profile, from anywhere in the organization, to fill an
    unexpected vacancy.
•    Identify key positions which have no candidate available in organization.
•    Reconcile the aspiration of key people with the opportunities available.
•    Ensure of creating an appropriate talent pool to support the future needs.
•    Make hiring in terms of focus, priorities, and action.
•    Align corporate objectives and strategies to each person in the company.

4.    Reasons for considering Teaching Domain: Although competency and its mapping are very common in industries, but such study in educational institutes is a scare. It has remained a mystery why a teacher is recognized as a good teacher but not necessarily as a person of higher intellect or qualification. Also, according to Dearden et al (2001), academic departments operate largely in an informational vacuum when it comes to knowledge about the standards, staffing practices, resources, research expectations, and so forth of departments in their discipline. Apart from that, considering the views of Resnick et al (1995), by tradition, governance of education as of in public sector institutions or in any private sector ones, has been substantially a matter of setting and enforcing rules of procedure. The new education reform movement should be aiming for governance by outputs – that is, requiring education institutions to meet outcome criteria but leaving them free to devise their own procedures. The change in patterns of education governance is not easy to discern, is far from complete, and is uncertain of outcome. Secondly, that additional pressure for education standards has come from the public interest and industry requirement in overall higher achievement.
Hence, we considered these questions as an opportunity and tried to exploit the part of it. In the present work we tried to map the competency of the teaching fraternity of the B-Schools with an intention to highlight the required prerequisite for a B-school faculty. For this study we have selected a number of B-schools as well as reputed colleges located in and around Kolkata.

5.    Objective: To find out core competency areas for the postgraduate B-School teachers.

6.    Methodology:
6.1.    Hypothesis:
H0:      There is no specific domain of competency for teaching in postgraduate B-School.

6.2.     Sampling:
6.3.     Unit: Faculty of different postgraduate B-Schools in and around Kolkata. The respondent age varies from 26 to 60 years. They also vary on gender, marital status as well as qualification and experiences.
6.4.    Size: 60
6.5.    Selection Procedure: Judgment sampling; and are not representative of all the private institutes of Kolkata and around. These very selective institutions experience roughly the same types of market pressures and compete for the same type of post graduate students. Most of the institute in our sample set significant research expectation level for their faculty. The average weekly teaching load for the institutes sampled was 24 periods or 24 hours with 60 students per class and there was not much variation across the institutes. Nowadays all the institute place a heavy weight on doing research work, publication of article in standard journals, and development and accomplishing academic / research project. Faculty’s job responsibilities include teaching, research and other academic administration.

7. Instrument for data collection:
7.1.    Development of Instrument: Through literature survey and also open and free discussion with the final semester students of the post graduate B-schools their perception and expectation about the required competency for the B-school teachers were noted. Analysing these, the factors were considered for development of questionnaire. This questionnaire was validated by B-school teachers, directors, industry representatives of B-school’s Governing body and passed out students having industrial experience.

7.2.    Instrument: Open ended core competency format were developed for this work considering following factors: age, gender, marital status, no of years in the particular institute, total no of years in the field, no of years in the present position, job description, specific tasks, percentage of time spent performing each function, use of equipments, outside customer handling, internal / departmental dealing, level of mental ability, minimum level of education needed, actual level of education, necessary experience for the job,  time required to learn and perform the job, specific skills required for the job.

7.3    Data Collection: With the help of this questionnaire face to face interview
were conducted taking prior appointment with the selected B-school teachers.
7.4    Analysis: Significant components and its relevant competency factors were identified through factor analysis using software SPSS16® and conclusions were drawn.

8.      Results and Analysis:
8.1 Factor Analysis: Result of factor analysis were shown in Table I

Table I:  Rotated Component Matrix Evaluated from  Core Competency data  

Significant Factors For Competency

Component

 

1

2

3

AGE

.961

.156

.227

GENDER

.814

.429

.391

MARITAL STATUS

.274

-.049

.960

NO. OF YEARS IN THE  PARTICULAR  INSTITUTE

.841

.403

.361

TOTAL NO. OF YEARS IN THIS FIELD

.963

.257

-.079

NO. OF YEARS IN THE   PRESENT  POSITION

.791

.552

.262

JOB DESCRIPTION

.387

.916

.105

SPECIFIC TASKS

.698

-.474

.537

PERCENTAGE OF TIME SPENT PERFORMING EACH FUNCTION

-.894

.376

-.244

USE  OF EQUIPMENTS

.191

-.959

.211

OUTSIDE CUSTOMER  HANDLING 

.814

.429

.391

INTERNAL / DEPARTMENTAL DEALING 

.942

-.188

-.278

LEVEL OF MENTAL ABILITY

-.498

-.486

.719

MINIMUM LEVEL OF EDUCATION NEEDED

.942

-.188

-.278

ACTUAL LEVEL OF EDUCATION

.242

-.188

-.278

NECESSARY  EXPERIENCE  FOR THE JOB

.119

.984

.130

TIME REQUIRED TO  LEARN AND PERFORM THIS JOB

-.061

.991

-.119

SPECIFIC SKILLS REQUIRED FOR THIS  JOB.

.273

-.647

-.712

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.
 Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.

It is evident from the above Factor Analysis that significant factors can be clubbed primarily into two groups (broadly in three).
The validation of the above Factor Analysis is evident from the component transformation matrix (Table II.) as shown below.

T

Table II:  Component Transformation Matrix evaluated for   

                Core Competency Data 

Components

1

2

3

1

.952

.263

.155

2

-.275

.959

.065

3

-.132

-.105

.986

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis. 

 Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.


 
From the Table II it can be inferred that each competency component has their individual identity and no repetition of value is observed. Thus the three groups obtained from the Factor Analysis are confirmed.

From the result of factor analysis it was evident that the Core Competency for teaching can be grouped under the two major heads.  Component number 1 could be identified as ‘Experience that matters’ for a B-school teacher and the name for component number 2  may be given as  ‘Job itself’ as because this components signified the prerequisite of a particular job. The summary of the Core Competency and their significant factors were shown in Table III.


Table III: Core Competency and their Significant Factors

Core competency

Significant Factors

 

 

Experience

                                           Age

Minimum level of education needed

Total no. of years in this field 

Internal / departmental dealing 

                      

Job itself

Job description 

Necessary  experience  for the job 

Time required to  learn and perform this job 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9.    Interpretation: There exist some specific areas of competency for teaching professional (in MBA). Thus   we rejected Null Hypothesis -
      H0:  There is no specific competency area for teaching in postgraduate B-School.
      This means there are specific competency areas for teaching in postgraduate B-school.

10.    Conclusion: Competency for teaching can be in two significant core areas, namely Experience and Job itself. Further conclusion can be drawn from the analysis that  specific skill, specific task, time spent even mental ability of teachers are not the core competency required for teaching in B-school, although general perception contradict this finding. In this study only the components and its factors were identified and the level of those for particular position, were not determined. The educational reform movement is aiming for governance by outputs i.e. requiring education institutions to meet outcome criteria but leaving them free to devise their own procedures. Hence this study will help the B-school management to develop their own procedures for selecting and determining the level of riders for generation of standard output by the B-school teachers.
 
11.    References
1.    Boyatzis, Richard E. (1982). The competent manager: A model for effective   performance. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
2.    Dearden, James, Taylor, Larry, and Thornton, Robert. (2001). A benchmark Profile of Economic  Departments in 15 Private Universities. Journal of Economic Education. Vol 32, o 4
3.    Dubois, D. (1993). Competency Based Performance Improvement, A Strategy for  Organisational Change, Amherst, Mass.: HRD Press.
4.    Linkage, Inc. (1997). Introduction to Competency Modeling, Lexington, Mass.:  Linkage.
5.    Resnick, Lauren B, Nolan, Katherine J and resnick, Daniel P (1995). Benchmarking Education standards. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analyisis. Vol 17, no 4, pp 438-461.
6.    Shermon, G. (2004),Competency Based HRM, Tata McGraw – Hill publishing   company Ltd. , New Delhi.