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TRAINING AS A STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT TOOL FOR UNIVERSITY ORGANIZATION Agostino Massa
Dispos, University of Genoa
Represented by Professor N.S. Popov and a Member of the Editorial Board Professor V.I. Konovalov
Key Words and Phrases: organization; training; university.
Abstract: Universities, as every organisations operating in an evolving environment, can be successful just adopting proper strategies and relying on skilled and motivated human resource.
The article, divided in two parts, at first shows the organizational change experienced by leading universities in Western European countries, which are shifting from the Institution-Bureaucracy (IB) model to the Business-Professional Network (BPN) model. In the frame of this new managerial perspective, University sets the mission to deliver education and research services and is considered as a source of innovation and change. Its main goal is to train proactive professionals, adopting customer focus and quality orientation. In the relations with the environment it looks for a strong interdependence with all the stakeholders and network partners. The change from IB to BPN model is going on mainly because of more organisational and managerial autonomy, more competition for attracting students and a change in social attitudes towards university, considered as a centre delivering services.
In the second part, some guidelines are indicated for the setting up of an effective training process to develop university human resources. Attention is paid to the four steps of the training process.
1 Introduction
Organizations of every size and kind operate nowadays in a very fast evolving environment, pushing them for innovation and change: companies and public administrations as well as non governmental organizations. Environmental evolution affects every field of production and work, just to mention the development in information technologies, the globalization of social interdependence, the rise and fall of political and economic actors in the world scene.
The key word in such process is “knowledge” (Davenport - Prusak 1998) and only the organizations able to produce, manage and exchange this crucial good will succeed in the challenge. As it has been pointed out, «global competition and fast pace of change have emphasised the importance of human capital in the organization, and the speed and ways in which they learn» (Torrington and others 2002: 401).
According to Bell (1974), knowledge is the axial principle of postindustrial society. “Knowledge workers” are the most valuable asset for organizations not just in the service sector (which count today about 70% of total employment in advanced
economies) but also in manufacturing. The same point is discussed by Drucker (1993) when he argues that in Post-Capitalist Society immaterial knowledge overtakes material capital as a basis for economic development.
The need for knowledge workers means that organizations must pay attention to the development of their human resource in every moment of its cycle, from recruitment to career path and empowerment. A very important activity in human resource management is therefore education and training, especially in organizations experiencing strategical repositioning.
Training can be referred to a set of activities aiming to develop someone’s capabilities and strategic skills which s/he adopts to deal with the different needs arising form the working context (Isfol 1992: 114). It is a process developing in a long span of time and involving not just someone’s “knowledge” but also his/her ability “to know what to do” and “to know how to be”.
Universities are today an interesting example of organizations facing a strategic change, where training issues are relevant. In this paper we shall focus, first, on the transformation of universities and, second, on how to set up effective training processes for university staff.
2 Universities and Strategic Change
Universities are organizations providing services in the field of education and research. They are complex organizations which, according to Mintzberg (1979), consist of three parts:
1 Academic staff (professors and researchers), in charge of teaching and research.
2 Technical and administrative staff, in charge of all services supporting teaching and researching activities.
3 Strategic management (Rector, Academic Council, Dean of Faculty, Administrative Director), in charge of strategic planning and management and supervising other parts’ work.
Looking at the University as an institution existing since many centuries and widespread all over the world, we can hardly recognize just a single model. There are actually different ones. Trying to put all them in order, “ideal-typical” models of University organizations can be built considering specific variables, such as: Mission and values; Relations with environment; Role of organisational elements; Coordination patterns; Communication (Mazzei 2000).
The combining of these specific variables allows to design three main models of University organization:
- Collegium-Academy University.
- Institution-Bureaucracy University.
- Business-Professional Network University.
In Western European countries, leading universities are shifting from the Institution-Bureaucracy (IB) to the Business-Professional Network (BPN) model, even if there is still a long way to go.
In the IB model the mission is to graduate a large number of students and carry out researches on behalf of the nation. Students are considered as beneficiary of a service, under values oriented to equality of treatment and opportunities. Relations with the environment show a dependency from outside to trade resources with services, state regulations and bureaucratic control, companies merely “receiving” graduates. Organization is based upon a dual structure: academic staff and technical-administrative staff. Coordination patterns consist mainly in the standardization of procedures and skills. The role of communication is limited to formalization and circulation of tasks and
work procedures and to information flows between university and external control agencies.
The BPN model is clearly different. University sets the mission to deliver education and research services and is considered as a source of innovation and change. Its main goal is to train proactive professionals, adopting customer focus and quality orientation. In the relations with the environment it looks for a strong interdependence with all the stakeholders and network partners. State plays a role in economic development policies and companies are both customers and partners in the process of knowledge development. A new role is also played by organizational elements. Academic staff behave as a professional network and get managerial skills, while technical-administrative staff get specialization and a business process logic is introduced. Coordination patterns deal with inter functional integration, reciprocal adaptation, standardization of results and strategic planning. Communication function is oriented to support of organizational work, inter dependencies management, knowledge sharing and service relations management.
The change from IB to BPN model is going on mainly because of:
- more organisational and managerial autonomy;
- more competition for attracting students;
- a change in social attitudes towards university, considered as a centre delivering services.
Adopting the BPN model as a reference to redesign University, we should not forget that it is not a full-fledged business organization. Services to be delivered, such as subjects and their contents, are decided mainly by the scientific community, which is in charge of recruiting and evaluating academics and their research results, and partially by the market (stakeholders, e.g. students). Market anyway evaluates services offered and can take part, for instance, in the choice among different subjects. In practice, it can decide that there is more demand for engineers than lawyers, but then is the scientific community which decides about syllabi in technical studies.
A managerial approach is therefore needed to get efficiency and efficacy (Mazzei 2000, pp. 54-55).
The shift of towards BPN model implies working on the redefinition of strategy and the reorganization of the structure. A strategic plan must be adopted in which the University sets goals and means, evaluates its own strong and weak points and its current and future opportunities, in relation to its environment. The hardest part of this operation is the assessment of the organization and the empowerment of human resource.
In the BPN model of University, the organization is based upon processes, not just on divisions and units. A process is an activity consisting in the transformation of input into output. It can be divided into sub-processes. In organizations providing services, processes are mainly oriented to give answers to the needs of customers. They are finalized in the crucial relation between front-office personnel and customer, the “moment of truth” in which the service organization makes its values (Normann 1991). It is, for instance, the moment in which a tourist has a coffee in a bar or a businessman gets financial advice from a bank.
An effective service organization relies very much also on back office people and activities. In such organizations, as Albrecht (1990) has stressed, those who are not serving customers, are anyway serving someone who is serving customers. Therefore, the quality of the service offered to the final customer depends on the whole business process along the “value chain” and on the internal marketing relations. Giving that processes can involve more than just one unit and both front office and back office, it is crucial for the organization to employ process-oriented and not position-oriented people.
In the specific case of University, processes can be classified in:
- Core business processes.
- Support processes.
- Management processes.
While the contents of management processes are clear, core business and support processes need some more description. University core business services are mainly teaching and researching, which are performed by academic staff. In the BPN model, anyway, support processes are also very important. Services delivered to students can be classified in primary services, technical secondary services and relational secondary services (Invernizzi 1999).
Primary services are related to University core business processes and include: tutoring and individual counselling (student career orientation); teaching (in academic courses); student supervising; training on basic skills (writing, presentations, ...); placement; stages; study and research abroad; students office.
Secondary services are delivered through support processes. There are technical services, such as information boards, library, it working stations and internet, technical and language laboratories, sport facilities, accommodation and canteens, as well as relational services, such as reception, students meeting by professors and information services.
When a strategic plan is adopted, an organization sets new goals. It implies that service delivering processes - we mean here basically secondary services - can involve brand new organizational units (e.g. electronic data processing or external relations units) or already existing but improved ones (e.g. international relations or students office). Human resource management becomes therefore a key tool for strategically oriented organizations. Main needs are to recruit the right people for the new organizational positions, from inside or even outside, and to train or retrain all the staff. Competencies must be developed for the new jobs while everybody must get the awareness to work in a process-based and quality orientated organization.
The focus is therefore on human resource development. Harrison (1997: 424) proposes a systematic model of learning and training, consisting of four steps: (a) Identify development need; (b) Design development activity; (c) Carry out development; (d) Evaluate development. This “training cycle” is set within an external environment and within an organisation strategy and a human resource development strategy. A final evaluation of the process is necessary to start again after assessment.
There are actually many approaches to learning and development: training courses; learning on the job; open, distance and e-learning. These approaches are described in full in Torrington and others (2002: 428-436). According to their purposes, there are different categories of training courses: pre-experience courses and post-experience courses; consultancy courses; in-house courses; outdoor-type courses. There are also many ways for learning on the job: coaching; mentoring; peer relationships; action learning; self development; self development groups; learning logs; learning contracts.
3 Setting Up an Effective Training Process
A training course is very often a key feature in a formal programme of development. It is the usual way in which people acquire the skills and knowledge in order to improve their capacity to perform effectively. According to Harrison’s model of training cycle, the training process can be drawn as a circular loop consisting of four parts (Fig. 1).
The training process involves three actors: the customer institution (i.e. the University); the target group (i.e. the employees which are going to take part in the
training process); the trainer and the training institution. The training institution can be a unit inside the University itself or an external one providing services to the general public. We assume, anyway, that it works as an independent actor after it has been appointed by the customer institution. The whole training process which we are going to describe is carried out by the training institution.
The first step is the analysis of employees’ learning and training needs in terms of skills, attitudes, motivation, in relation to their position in the organization and to its goals. The two most traditional approaches to analysing needs are the problem-centred approach and the matching of the individual’s competences profile with that for the job they are filling.
Planning is very important as well. The training process must be bespoke and sustainable. Every training course must be made according to the actual needs of any individual customer and any target group. Sustainability means paying attention to internal, external and structural factors. Internal factors include: programmes of organisation units and positions; financial resources for training activities; strategic priorities. External factors can be related to: general legal system; new tasks for the organisation. Finally, structural factors regard: organisation of units and services; employees’ profiles and tasks.
After macro and micro planning, in which even specific subjects and trainers are identified (Castagna 1991), the training course is ready to be delivered. It must be taken into due account that the training process is first of all the delivery of a service. Services are economic activities that create value and provide benefits for customers at specific times and places, as a result of bringing about a desired change in - or on behalf of - the recipient of the service (Lovelock et Al. 1999). In our case, the change is related to the members of the target group of the training process, who should experience an improvement about their “to know”, “to know how to do” or “to know how to be”.
In the model of “strategic service management” designed by Normann (1991), a very important element is the “system of service delivering”. In the training process, it consists of the trainer and the target group, performing in physical site (lay out) provided with teaching facilities (boards, transparencies, powerpoint, video-conferencing, and so on). The trainer can deliver frontal teaching but also use other methodologies, such as role-playing, problem-solving, case-studies, and so on. During a training course, many trainers follow in front of the class. Important is the role of the tutor, someone in charge of introducing the different trainers and their subjects to the class, to help them in preparing and handing over teaching materials, to assure good relations between the target group and the training staff.
The training institution aims to deliver a service of high quality. This can happen when the customer is provided with the expected benefits, with proper answers to his/her needs. In few words, when there is customer satisfaction. We must therefore consider that there are basic differences between goods and services which make difficult to deliver quality services: customers do not obtain ownership of services; service products are intangible performances; there is greater involvement of customers in the production
( a ) Needs analysis
( d ) Evaluation
( c ) Delivering Fig. 1 The training cycle
process; other people may form part of the product; there is greater variability in operational inputs and outputs; many services are difficult for customers to evaluate; there is typically absence of inventories; the time factor is relatively more important; delivery systems may involve both electronic and physical channels.
Moreover, quality is related by customers to the whole outcome. A chain is as strong as its weaker ring. In the same way, it is important to pay attention to every detail, to every “moment of truth” in the process of service delivering.
The training process is not completed with course delivering but an effective evaluation is necessary. Without it, the difference comes between “courses delivering” and “people development”.
In the evaluation process are involved again all the three actors, each one with different interests and attitudes. The customer institution has an interest in verifying the achieving of training goals, the matching of training goals and organisation strategies, the costs/benefits balance. The target group, has an opportunity to have a say about the training activity in which they took part. The training institution needs a feed-back on the activity, to understand what went right and what went wrong and why, in order to make it better in further activities. It must be remembered that training failures can be related to different parts of the training process and not just to course delivering. They can be referred to wrong needs analysis, undefined or unclear teaching goals, planning failures, mistakes in performing or managing the course.
Evaluation must be planned together with other parts at the beginning of the training process and carried out at the end, using post-course questionnaires. Sometimes to submit an intermediate questionnaire can be helpful. Evaluation is measured on three levels: satisfaction, learning, organizational effectiveness.
University as a customer of training activities is interested in organizational effectiveness, which is anyway a consequence of target group satisfaction and learning. The problem is that such outcome is not easy to evaluate. While evaluation is straightforward when the output of the training is clear to see, like reducing the number of dispatch errors in a warehouse or increasing someone’s typing speed, it is more difficult in the case of a management training course or a programme of social skills development (Torrington and others 2002: 436). Moreover, give that organizational change is a very slowly going process, it is not possible to determine in how much time training activities give place to their effects.
4 Conclusions
Human resource development issues are crucial in organisations operating in a global and fast evolving environment. As Pettigrew and others (1988) have pointed out, they get a higher priority when they are linked to organisational need and take a more strategic approach. Some final considerations and remarks can help to focus better on how the strategic management of a University can set up effective training activities in the frame of their human resource development process.
Different roles and interests of the three actors involved in the training process must be clear. University, on the one hand, is interested in the effectiveness of the process and cannot accept that the period in which employees are attending development activities turns into a waste of time and money. Employees, on the other hand, must perceive the training process not just as a pleasant break or a mere formality but as a real development opportunity. The training institution, finally, must act as a reliable partner of the customer institution, considering training activities as a tool to cope with University’s development needs and not just a way to make money. It must give the customer institution what actually needed in terms of learning for its employees and not
just what it is used to offer. If the training institution is lacking in the specific expertise required, it must rely on external trainers and consultants.
University therefore must carefully choose the training institution. After the appointment and the definition of the development goals it must not interfere with training work any more.
Human resource development must be played at different organisational levels. In normal periods, its management implies the planning and delivering of specific development activities for each segment of the personnel: top management, middle managers, front liners. In the event of a strategic change, however, all the employees must take part in information and training activities. Everybody is entitled to know where the organisation is going and how. Development activities must not be just a reward for someone or a punishment for someone else, but a right and an opportunity for everybody. University as a complex organisation can achieve its strategic goals only if all its members develop effective relational and technical skills and work together sharing a common vision.
References
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Обучение как инструмент стратегического управления организацией университета
Агостино Масса
Диспос, Университет Генуи Ключевые слова и фразы: обучение; организация; университет.
Аннотация: Университеты, как и все организации, работающие в развивающейся среде, могут быть успешными только при принятии соответствующих стратегий и наличии квалифицированного и заинтересованного персонала.
В статье, состоящей из двух частей, сначала показывается, какие организационные изменения происходят в ведущих университетах западноевропейских стран, переходящих от бюрократическо-организационной модели (БО) к модели бизнес-профессиональной сети (БПС). В рамках этой новой управленческой программы университеты ставят перед собой задачу предоставления образовательных и исследовательских услуг и выступают в качестве источника инноваций и перемен. Основная цель заключается в подготовке проактивных профессионалов, ориентированных на потребителя и уделяющих большое внимание качеству. Взаимоотношения с окружающей средой строятся по принципу взаимной зависимости как между всеми заинтересованными лицами, так и партнерами по сети. Переход от БО модели к модели БПС осуществляется благодаря большей организационной и управленческой автономии, увеличению конкуренции в сфере привлечения студентов и изменении отношения общества к университетам, выступающим в качестве центра предоставления услуг.
Во второй части даются направления по организации эффективного учебного процесса по подготовке университетских кадров. Внимание уделяется четырем этапам учебного процесса.
Ausbildung als Instrument der strategischen Leitung von Universitatenstruktur
Zusammenfassung: Sowohl die Universitaten als auch alle Organisationen, die im entwickelnden Medium funktionieren, konnen nur bei der Annahme der entsprechenden Strategien und bei dem Vorhandensein des qualifizierten und interessierten Personals erfolgreich sein.
Im aus zwei Teilen bestehenden Artikel wird gezeigt, welche Organisationsveranderungen in den fuhrenden Universitaten der vom burokratischen Organisationsmodell zum Modell des business-professionalen Netzes ubergehenden westeuropaischen Lander stattfinden. In Rahmen dieses neuen Leitungsprogramm stellen die Universitaten die Aufgabe der Leistung der Ausbildungs- und Forschungsdienste und treten als die Innovations- und Anderungsquelle auf. Das Hauptziel besteht in der Vorbereitung der auf den Verbraucher orientierten proaktiven Fachleute. Die Wechselbeziehungen mit der Umwelt grunden sich auf das Prinzip der gegenseitigen Abhangigkeit sowohl zwischen allen interessierten Personen als auch zwischen den Netzpartnern. Der Ubergang vom BO-Modell zum BPN-Modell wird durch die grofle Organisations- und Leitungsautonomie verwirklicht. Er wird auch durch die Steigerung der Konkurrenz im Bereich der Studentenheranziehung und durch die Veranderung des Gesellschaftverhaltens zu den Universitaten, die als Zentrum der Dienstleistungen auftreten, realisiert.
Im zweiten Teil werden die Richtungen der Organisation des effektiven Lehrprozesses in der Vorbereitung der Lehrkrafte gegeben. Die Aufmerksamkeit wird den vier Etappen des Lehrprozesses geschenkt.
Enseignement comme un instrument de la gestion strategique de l’organisation de l’universite
Resume: L’article se compose de deux parties et l’on y montre d’abord les changements organisationnels qui se passent dans les plus grandes universites de l’Europe occidentale a partir du modele organisationnel bureaucratique (BO) jusqu’au
modele du reseau business-profession (RBP). Dans le cadre de ce nouveau programme de gestion les universites se posent comme but l’octoi de services d’enseignement et de recherches et deviennent elles-memes les sources des innovations et des changements. L’objectif essentiel est la formation des specialistes proactifs qui sont orientes vers le consommateur et qui accordent une grande importance a la qualite. Les relations avec l’environnement reposent sur le principe d’interdependance entre les personnes concernees et les partenaires du reseau. Le transfert du modele BO au modele RBP se fait grace a une grande autonomie d’organisation et de gestion, a l’augmentation de la concurrence dans le domaine de l’emploi de l’activite estudiantine et au changement de la relation de la societe envers les universites qui se trouvent au centre de la prestation des services.
La deuxieme partie montre les orientations de l’organisation du processus d’enseignement efficace en ce qui concerne la formation des cadres d’universite. On accorde l’attention aux quatre etapes du processus d’enseignement.
