Research on the Business Management Talents’ Capability Appraisal System Based on Employability

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International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

Research on the Business Management Talents’ Capability Appraisal System Based on Employability Daokui Jiang*1, Qun Bai2 Business School, Shandong Normal University; International Business School, Chongqing Technology and Business University 88, East Culture Road, Lixia District, Ji’nan Shandong, China 250014 *1jdk240504@163.com; 2baiqun@ctbu.edu.cn Received 27 March, 2014; Accepted 3 April, 2014; Published 15 July, 2014 © 2014 Science and Engineering Publishing Company

Abstract Personnel ability in higher education is the comprehensive quality, which is valuable to finish the job, acquired through learning, training, practice and other means, not only the professional knowledge, but also the skills, ability and potential ability, individual inclination, personality trait.

Previous research on competency based education focused on the occupation education. To define the connotation of employability based education, this paper analyses dimensions of business management talents’ capability.

Employability oriented talents capability appraisal system research has a certain significance on the improvement of the quality of the talent assessment.

Keywords Employability; Higher Education; Business Management; Human Capital; Talent Development

Introduction According to New Economic Growth Theory, knowledge and human capital are much more important than the other producing materials in the process of economic growth, especially the human capital integration value (Romer P M, 1990; Daokui Jiang, Qun Bai, Tiqin Zhang, 2010). Most organizations will face a dynamic, complex and competitive environment in the future for a long time. Acquisition, development and maintain a quantitive of personnel have become a serious problem that every enterprise must solve (I Tarique, Schuler S R, 2010).

Since the 1970s, educational mode have been into the vision of researchers, who found that exploration of educational model can balance the relationship

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between education and other social activities, and generally optimize educational activities. Educators paid more and more attention on educational mode, an important category of educational practice and concept of educational theory. Talents under traditional education mode are difficult to adapt to the task of enterprises, and transferring educational mode faces many suspects.

Chinese higher education experienced 10 years of expansion, forming the largest higher education system in the world, and it is developing towards the connotation of improving quality as the core.

Domestic educational reform of universities focus on personnel training mainly comes from two aspects: talent culture experience of foreign first-class universities and analysis of talents growth law (Xiaojian Chen, Feng Li, Tianzhuo Liu, 2011). The talent appraisal system based on employability has rarely been studied. Employability based education, combing with the professional education, the traditional occupation education, general education, trained a set of professional knowledge, skills in the higher education stage, which has a certain significance for the appraisal of education, teaching reform.

The Connotation of Employability The employability based education in different periods and different countries, displays different modality and characteristics. In the philosophy of education, there is mainly representative activism of America and social constructivism of Holland. In the

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view of activism, it requires to do detailed analysis of the ability that requires a particular occupation or specific duties, and makes a specific description of the main aspects of the capacity. The teaching content will be divided into different units according to the description, and the ability is achieved mainly through the implementation of various units of teaching. Social constructivism holds that, besides the simple stimulus response learning and education process, the ability of individual thinking, social communication, adapting to the complex environment is emphasized, showing the importance of knowledge creation capability.

Chappell et al. (2000) discussed the concept of ability from the perspective of positivism, humanism, criticism (Chappell C, Gonczi A, Hager P, 2000).

Employability based education is basically used as relative subjects knowledge of traditional education, whose purpose is to provide education or training according to specific occupational ability and to achieve the qualification or learning outcomes (Futao Huang, 2012). Employability as a psychological concept, refers to the individual psychological characteristics people demonstrated the possibility to solve the problems. In the view of sociology, employability is the ability to understand individual comprehensive quality reflected in the real operation of practical skills, energy and proficiency, an effective way to realize the human value, a positive force about social development. We make a definition of employability: It is a comprehensive quality of knowledge, skills and abilities, gained through education and training, including society, economy, culture, and it can handle the problems such as the values, attitudes, personalities, characters and so on.

The Appraisal System of Employability The business management should combine practice to cultivate talents' innovative ability under modern management theory and information technology.

However, what ability should business management personnels have is an issue the educators should consider. Business management ability is inevitably very different from other disciplines, and to establish appraisal system of business management talents is necessary for enterprise managers. Based on the related literatures, this paper puts forward a set of business management discipline personnel ability appraisal system, including four dimensions of knowledge and skills, abilities and potential ability, individual inclination and personality trait (Shuhong Wang, 2012). To complete each work is indispensable

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for the above four dimensions of employability.

Knowledge and Skills Knowledge is individual experience of nature and society, and skill is the mode and system of action through the exercise. Business management discipline should master the knowledge of science, economics, and the skills of applying the theories to business management practice. Through the literature analysis, selecting the "professional knowledge", "practical knowledge", "computer application ability", "foreign language application ability", "learning ability" to reflect the dimension of knowledge and skills.

Ability and Potential Ability Ability is the essential psychological characteristic of a certain individual to complete a work, which directly affects the efficiency of the activities. It is the basis and prerequisite for learning and mastering the knowledge and skills. Potential ability is called aptitude, which refers to the likelihood of completing a task through proper training. Potential ability is the basis of what a person can learn to do, and what degree a person acquires new knowledge and skills. Through the literature analysis, selecting the "cognition ability", "communication skills", "art ability", "management ability", "interpersonal relationship", "innovate ability", "lifelong learning ability" to reflect the dimension of ability and potential ability.

Individual Inclination The individual inclination is a dynamic system, including motivation, interest, needs, beliefs and value ideas. To be successful, in addition to knowledge and ability, the individual should also have motives, the willingness to work. The concept about the goals and beliefs of the individual must be in consistent with his or her behaviour. In the dynamic system, value ideas are the most extensive factor. In addition to the value ideas, motivation is also an important part of dynamic factors that promote individual behaviour. Person with a strong achievement motive often behaves actively and probably ends up with a successful career. Through the literature analysis, selecting the "organizational commitment", "team spirit", "empathy", "responsibility", "progressive" to reflect the dimension of individual inclination.

Personality Trait Personality trait is the stable psychological characteristic in the treatment of objective attitude and

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behaviour way. According to different attitude systems, the character of the people can be manifested in: individual characters to others, to goods, to work and to himself. According to different patterns of behaviour, personality trait displays whether he or she obeys the discipline, controls his or her personal behavior in urgent situation. Through the literature analysis, selecting the "hard working", "responsible", "initiative", "planning", "persistent", "confidence", "achievement orientation" to reflect the dimension of the personality trait.

Test of the Employability Appraisal System This paper adopted a web-based e-mail survey design to collect data to study the appraisal system validate and the link between ability and employment results.

The questionnaire mainly included three aspects: the demographic variables, including gender, age, educational degree; employment outcomes, including job satisfaction, income level; talent ability, including aspects of personnel capacity. All of the independent and dependent variables were based on a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”.

The object of study is engaged in industrial and commercial management in the enterprise's staff, but also includes a few personnels engaged in scientific research. A total of 500 questionnaires were mailed.

Follow-up letters e-mails and phone calls were done after 2 weeks. Of the 364 questionnaires returned, 33 responses were incomplete. The remaining 331 valid and complete questionnaires were used for the quantitative analysis. The sample distribution, gender, male 49.2%, female 50.8%; age distribution, under 25 years of age accounted for 8.5%, 26-30 years of age accounted for 30.2%, 31-40 years of age accounted for 35.3%, 41 years old accounted for 26%; working age distribution, under 1 year of age accounted for 4.8%, 12 years accounted for 5.1%, 2-3 years accounted for 12.1%, 3-5 years accounted for 13.3%, more than 5 years accounted for 64.7%; the educational degree, high school and below accounted for 6.9%, college education accounted for 29.3%, bachelor degree accounted for 43.8%, master degree and above accounted for 19.9%.

Reliability And Construct Validity Statistically using Cronbach's coefficient α and CICT coefficient to test the internal consistency, using principal component analysis to examine the construct

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validity. The results showed that, the measured CITC value is higher than 0.5, the overall Cronbach 's α is 0.933. After delete individual items, Cronbach' s α is 0.937. There is no obvious improvement with the original one. So it should delete the "foreign language application ability". The conclusion is that, internal consistency appraisal system is high.

Using principal component factor analysis to check Construct validity. Principal component analysis result of KMO value is 0.934, Bartlett test is 0.000, and four common factor is extracted. Because the loading of "art ability" in four dimensions is less than 0.5, so it should be removed. After principal component analysis, KMO value was 0.936, Bartlett test is 0.000, the factor loading test items were above 0.5, and the cumulative variance is 60.616%. The first factor corresponds knowledge and skills, including 4 items; the second factor corresponds ability and potential ability, including 6 items; the third factor corresponds individual inclination, including 5 items; the fourth factor corresponds personality trait, including 7 items.

Predictive Validity This study investigated the relationship between business management talent ability and employment outcomes by stepwise regression analysis. Four dimensions and the specific content of ability appraisal system are selected as independent variables, and job satisfaction and income as the dependent variables. Gender, age, educational background were the control variables. After descriptive statistics of variables and the correlation coefficient matrix, there is a negative and significant relationship between gender and income, in accordance with common sense; while there is no significant relationship between the four dimensions of ability and gender. There is a positive correlation between education level and ability, and as the educational degree increases, the ability will increase.

There is a positive correlation between work experience and income levels, while there is no significant relationship between work experience and ability. There is a positive relationship among four dimensions of ability, that is, knowledge, ability, individual inclination and personality trait are interacted.

Applying the tool of Eviews to do OLS regression analysis. In the results of job satisfaction as dependent variable, the whole model is significant (R2=0.194, p=0.000), but to measure the satisfaction level, several

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elements of existing were limited. Specifically, age (r=0.099, p=0.055<0.1), educational degree (r=0.128, p=0.028<0.1), knowledge and skills (r=0.402, p=0.000<0.001) had significant effects on job satisfaction. With the increase of age, level of job satisfaction and knowledge will rise. And individual inclination, personality trait has no direct and positive influence on job satisfaction levels. This is consistent with common sense.

In the result of income level as dependent variable, the model is significant (R2=0.193, p=0.000), but to measure the level of income, the existing elements were limited.

Specifically, gender (r=-0.433, p=0.000), age (r=0.331, p=0.000), educational degree (r=0.282, p=0.000) had a significant positive influence on income level, but the positive effect of knowledge and skills (r=0.170, p=0.146>0.1), ability and potential ability (r=0.086, p=0.603>0.1) on the income level were not significant, and the negative effect of personality tendency (r=0.080, p=0.633>0.1) and character (r=-0.071, p= 0.646>0.1) on the income level were not significant. A possible explanation is, the work time is too short for the students to pull the income gap, and job satisfaction as individual working condition of the integrated perception index has differences because of individual appraisal ability.

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As the number of the investigation scope, the sample of this study has limitations. In addition, after the establishment of the business management talents’ ability appraisal system, how to design the teaching system in the teaching process according to the requirements is an important subject for the educators.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors thank the participating company and its employees for their cooperation during this project.

Finance supported by Shandong Province Statistical Department (No. KT13144), Shandong province regulations project (optimization of financial industry, regional development and collaborative management innovation center) are gratefully acknowledged.

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Conclusion and Discussion

the Historical and Comparative Perspective.” China

Improving college students' employability is the core of quality education. With the increase of age and educational degree, income level will increase. The level of ability should be directly related to the level of income in theory, but the empirical research found that, there is no directly positive effect of ability level on income. Perhaps there is a process for individual knowledge and ability transferring into personal income.

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The results show, talent management capability has a positive effect on graduation results, and the appraisal system has a predictive validity. As a close contact with the enterprise practice discipline, talent in business management should have a comprehensive quality. Specifically, it is the establishment of appraisal system. In this study, the connotation, characteristics and dimensions of business management talents employability are discussed, and the appraisal system is constructed as well. The empirical study based on questionnaire survey verifies the system from the reliability and the validity.

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Shuhong Wang. The Personnel Quality Appraisal. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2012.

Tarique I, Schuler S R. “Global talent management: liter review, integrative framework, and suggestion for future research.” Journal of world business 45(2010):122-133.

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Daokui Jiang (Shandong Province of China, Dec, 1982). Owned the Ph. d Degree of Management in Shandong University in 2012. Research on the field of Knowledge Management, Human Resource Management, Human Capital and Educational Economy. At present, teaching at Shandong Normal University, Shandong Province of China.

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International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

Qun Bai (Chongqing City of China, Sep, 1966). Dean of International Business School of Chongqing Technology and Business University.

Owned the Executive Master of

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Business Administration in Chongqing University in 2013.

Research on the field of Human Resource Management. At present, teaching at Chongqing Technology and Business University, Chongqing City of China.