Doctoral Degrees (Industrial Psychology)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Industrial Psychology) by Author "Pienaar, Jacques"

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    The development and psychometric evaluation of a graduate leader competency questionnaire
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Pienaar, Jacques; Theron, Callie C.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Dept. of Industrial Psychology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT : The impending retirement of a large number of industry’s senior and most influential leaders (mostly from Generation X) around the world is increasingly putting pressure on HR departments to be able to identify management potential from and accelerate the leadership development of the latest generation to enter the workforce (i.e. Generation Y) in order to deliver a supply of high calibre executives and leaders for the future. In order to diagnose the causes of low levels of employability amongst Generation Y graduates emanating from South African universities, to inform the recruitment and selection of these graduates as well as their development upon entry into the organisation, and to inform interventions aimed at the development of psychological states that affect (intrinsic) work motivation and lower turnover intention, that in turn, are all necessary prerequisites for the development of effective leadership acceleration programmes, the complex nomological network of latent variables characterising the graduate employee (i.e. transient psychological states, malleable attainments and rather inflexible, non-malleable dispositions) and characterising the work environment (i.e. job characteristics, job demands, span of control, etc.) that affect graduate leader performance and turnover, first need to be validly mapped and understood. This research challenge naturally broaches the questions as to what graduate leader performance means, and secondly, how graduate leader performance can be measured. The research design utilised a mixed method approach (coupling quantitative and qualitative methodologies) to develop answers to these afore-mentioned questions. The long-term goal was ultimately to conceptualise the graduate leader performance construct (i.e. what graduate leader performance means) as a five-domain job performance hypothesis (i.e. a competency model approach to job performance) in which the relevant latent variables in the competency potential, competency, competency outcomes, competency requirements and job and organisational characteristics domains of this performance space are structurally mapped onto each other in a richly interconnected network of cause-and-effect relationships. Thus, the aforementioned competency model in terms of the abstract (and as-of-yet unknown) latent variables that populate its different domains needed to be fully explicated and empirically tested. However, as the full explication of such a multidomain hypothesis was considered a massive and overly ambitious undertaking and implied a multiphase project spanning a considerable amount of time, the focus of the present study was limited to the explication of the behavioural (or competency) domain of graduate leader performance only (or first). The explication of the other domains of the competency model (i.e. competency potential, competency outcomes, competency requirements and the job and organisational characteristics domains) will have to be targeted by future studies as a matter of priority. The explication of the behavioural requirements of (graduate) leader performance ensued by way of a wide-ranging literature study on leadership and managerial requirements for the 21st century and in excess of 100 (first order) competencies were initially identified as being relevant to this cause. Thematic analysis was employed to group the (first-order) competencies into nine internally consistent themes and the relevance of these across South African organisations were confirmed through the employment of the Delphi method administered on sample of subject matter experts in the field. This led to hypothesising about the nature of the relationships between the nine (second-order) competencies and the derivation of a structural model that depicted the to-be-tested internal structure of the graduate leader performance construct (behaviourally interpreted). The question as to how graduate leader performance could be measured, on the other hand, was dealt with by developing an instrument (i.e. the PGLCQ) that could be used to measure these nine second-order competencies. The qualitative part of the study (more specifically the Critical Incident Technique field work) served as the basis for item development and the creation of behavioural anchors for these items. The PGLCQ eventually comprised of 90 questions (10 questions per competency) and utilised 5-point rating scales. The psychometric properties of the PGLCQ were examined on a sample of n=133 graduate leaders. While the initial plan was to collect multi-rater data (from the graduate leader and his or her manager) with which to analyse the psychometric properties of the PGLCQ, the data collection exercise was marred with a poor completion rate either from the side of the graduate or the manager (an incomplete response from either rendered the specific case unusable), and consequently this aim unfortunately did not realise. Nonetheless, the psychometric evaluation of the nine subscales of the PGLCQ by way of item and dimensionality analysis (self-rater responses) delivered results that were compatible with the position that all of them provided an adequate measure of the specific latent competency variables they were designed to assess (i.e. acceptable evidence was obtained to conclude their reliability and validity). The reliability coefficients of the different subscales of the PGLCQ were, moreover, found to be of an exceptional standard and the subsequent fitting of the overall PGLCQ measurement model led to the conclusion of close fit in the parameter. In addition, as the LISLEL output suggested that the item parcels of the PGLCQ competency questionnaire measurement model loaded satisfactorily and significantly on the latent variables they were earmarked to reflect, and the PGLCQ measurement model passed all tests of discriminant validity, the operationalisation of the latent variables that the graduate leader structural model comprises of were considered successful. On the other hand, when fitting the graduate leader performance construct to the comprehensive LISREL model, despite the fact that the exact and close fit hypotheses had to be rejected, acceptable model fit was nonetheless concluded as the Two-Index Presentation strategy combination rules provided sufficient evidence to argue that the fitted model was able to sufficiently accurately approximate the observed variance-covariance matrix. However, out of the eighteen path-specific hypotheses originally proposed, six could unfortunately not be corroborated. Five path coefficients associated with five path-specific hypotheses were found to be statistically insignificant in the beta matrix, while only one path coefficient associated with one path-specific hypothesis was found to be statistically insignificant in the gamma matrix. Nonetheless, support garnered for twelve of the original path-specific hypotheses resulted in the validation of a graduate leader performance (behaviourally interpreted) explanatory model, even if the internal structural relations between the latent variables included in the final model differed somewhat from the manner in which this psychological mechanism was initially thought to operate. Therefore, this study advances the quest for the availability and effective functioning of leaders in South African organisations via the practical suggestions offered for improving and accelerating leadership development as well as suggestions for future research to build on this, thus making a significant contribution to the development of a leading best practice approach to the recruitment, selection and development of high-performance graduate leaders for South Africa’s future.