Developing competency models supporting public universities’ strategic objectives: an application of a convergent mixed methods approach

In recent years, the attention on competencies in the workplace has grown rapidly. Organizations are progressively realizing how human capital figures as a key source of competitive advantage and how highly performing organizations are commonly linked to highly performing employees (Pfeffer, 1994; Lado and Wilson, 1994; Murray, 2003). In fact, it seems that traditional sources of success, as the existence of barriers to entries or the creation of economies of scale (Porter, 1996; Barney, 1991), are now perceived as able to provide competitive leverage to a lesser degree, while a robust organizational culture, strategic human resources management and organizations’ core competencies are becoming comparatively more important. Against this background, organizations are starting to employ new approaches to human resource management. The competency based management approach (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990; Green, 1999; Kochanski, 1997) is becoming increasingly popular among private companies. On the other hand, European public administration systems are only recently starting to implement competency management practices, attempting to keep pace with the demands of some major reforms introduced in the last thirty years (Horton et al., 2002). Public administration systems, in fact, are undergoing deep changes, striving to respond to the constantly mutating environment in which they are bound to operate: many activities are being outsourced back to the market in the belief that private companies are able to better respond to uncertainty and innovation, while the activities that still remain within governments’ direct control are increasingly adopting typical business practices and starting to benchmark themselves against their private equivalents, moving closer to a market based management logic that have been defined as “New Public Management” (Horton et al., 2002). The application of market logics to public administrations affected public universities as well, moving them towards what is being defined as “entrepreneurial” universities (Gibbons et al., 1994; Etzkowitz, 2003; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Sporn, 2001). These new logics strongly affected universities’ internal organizational assets, which, coherently with their specific context and characteristics, embraced a variety of different approaches and assumed diverse and mixed forms (Kwiek & Maassen, 2012; de Boer & File, 2009; Clark, 2000; Bleiklie, 2007). Competency based management approaches appear to be greatly discussed among public administrations, because they configure as a potentially effective and flexible solution to face these continuous changes in the modern economy and society, such as the growing globalization, the challenge of big data, the increasing competition, and the constant demand for innovation and optimization of processes and services. However, empirical implementations of competency models in public administrations are rarely traceable in the literature (Skorkovà, 2016; Cerase, 2003; Pastorello, 2010; Campion et al., 2010), and even less studies can be found in referral to public universities, especially if referred to non-academic employees, embedded in the technical, technical scientific, data processing, administration, and library professional areas. This extremely heterogeneous and complex context, however, undoubtedly ask for deeper investigation. Given these premises, the purpose of this action research is to contribute to the extant literature, attempting to understand how competencies of non-academic employees help them reach the university’s strategic objectives in one of the currently largest European universities, and, from the information arisen, generate an interpretative competency model that could be employed as a comparative framework for future practices and researches. A purposeful sampling strategy has been employed, leading me to select, as the site of the research, Sapienza, University of Rome. The choice fell on this specific university because it figures as an incredibly rich source of information, being the largest university in Europe with more than 4.000 technical, administrative and library employees. More specifically, to address the identified research questions, this doctoral study employs a convergent mixed methods approach (Caracelli & Greene, 1997; Greene, 2007) characterized by a robust qualitative component. The qualitative strand of the research involved employing a bottom up grounded approach to competency modeling, while the quantitative strand derived the competency model from the theory, aiming to link the individual competencies to the strategic objectives of the organization, applying a top down approach. The resulting model from the quantitative strand was, afterward, tested through a survey research. The bottom up grounded approach involved the use of phenomenological interviews detailing operant thoughts and actions associated with success or failure in 125 the technical, administrative, and library employees. Additionally, observations, memoing and field notes were collected with the aim to enrich the analysis. Thereafter, revealing an emergent design of the research, and pursuing the aim to reach a more comprehensive overview of the phenomenon, results from the qualitative strand have been integrated with a concurrent theory driven quantitative approach. The quantitative approach comprised the submission to participants of a list of competences, derived from the review of the literature and the study of the organization, querying them to attribute a level of importance on a scale from “0” to “5” (from “not important” to “extremely important”) to those competences, comparatively to their ability to positively impact on the achievement of their professional objectives. This doctoral thesis represents the outcome of a research conducted during the years 2017, 2018 and 2019, funded by Sapienza University of Rome, within a project entitled “the analysis of processes, competencies and job positions for the definition of an organizational model in complex public organizations”. The first phase of this project was dedicated to designing an organizational model for faculties and departments. The second phase was focused on building a competency model for the technical, administrative and library staff, for which, a formal organizational model figured as a necessary condition. The organizational model, revised and adapted by the organization and development area’s staff, has been implemented in the end of the year 2018. An extension of the research has been considered, thus, necessary, in order to project and build a competency model for the university’s employees that would enable the introduction of more flexible and dynamic strategies to human resources management. The realization of a competency model, in fact, is a key step to undertake in order to orient administrative and executive actions, to reach the strategic objectives and to promote employees’ skills and potential. This study can provide a useful framework for either scholars, researchers, practitioners, labor unions and policy makers intending to introduce or consider new approaches to human resource management in public universities or administrations, Furthermore, this study may provide useful insights to update existent contractual collective agreements or to introduce new organizational positions or professional roles. Administrators can employ the defined model to identify professional roles’ competencies, monitor employees’ actual level and plan interventions to eventually enhance it through training. The thesis contains six chapters that have been structured as follows: 1) the research design provides a preliminary overview of the research, by discussing its main features and underlying logic; 2) the second chapter reviews the main themes related to the competency based approach, starting from the analysis of the main interpretation of the term competency and concluding with an overview over the state of the art of competency modeling in European and Italian public administrations; 3) the chapter on methodology presents the adopted convergent mixed methods approach to competency modeling; 4) the fourth chapter provides an extensive outline of the adopted procedures, the emerging results, the limits and implications arising from the qualitative and the quantitative strands; 5) the section on interpretation describes the adopted mixing strategy and the results of the analysis of the emerging dataset; 6) the final chapter briefly reviews the main aims of the study, its core assumptions and discusses the results that arose from the interpretative and analytical phases, together with considerations on their limitations and how these limitations may configure further challenges in future research.