The Competencies That Are Required By Consultants In Order To Ensure an Efficient Consulting Practice - Essay Example

Research Proposal in ManagementContents Background 2 Literature Review 2 Research Aims and Objectives ` 4 Research Question 5 Research Methodology 5 Research philosophy 5 Approach to theory 6 Research Strategy 6 Method of data collection 7 Reliability and Validity 8 Ethical considerations 8 Time Line 8 Resources required 9 Summary 9 Reference List 11 Background The concept of management can be linked to the idea of organizational design consulting. According to the definition provided by Canback (1998) consultants can be defined as people who provide general management advice within organizational, strategic or operational context and who are institutionally organized in firms. The work of the management consultant is to help the client organization to recognize the management problems, analyze the problems and provide solutions to the problems. The role of the consultants has become extremely important in contemporary times to deal with critical issues faced by the organizations. The client organization often requires the skill and expertise to deal with the critical issues faced by the organization (Gross and Poor, 2008). Researchers have established that there is a link between organizational performance and organizational characteristic and both of these are influenced by a reverse relationship. It can be argued that the organizational characteristics can also have an influence on the consulting performance. The purpose of this dissertation proposal is to unearth the issues of competence of the consultant and the organizational characteristics to measure the impacts that these factors have on the consulting performance of the organization. Given the rising importance of the role of management consultants on organizational operations it is important to consider the competency of the consultants to enhance consulting performance. Similarly evaluation of organizational characteristics on consulting performance is also to be reviewed. Literature Review According to the views of Lundberg (1970 cited in Lundberg and Young, 2001) competence of an individual is a set of appropriate behaviour which acts as a framework for identifying, evaluating and developing an individual’s behaviour. Researchers have found out that competence is actually a combination of skills, knowledge and behaviour that helps in improving performance of an organization. According to Sandberg (2000) people who perform their responsibilities more competently than others can be argued to have finer set of attributes. Therefore it can be argued that the competence of the management consultant is a crucial factor that influences consulting performance. The existing literature identifies that there are a set of competencies that are important for consultants. There are ten domains of competencies that has been identified namely enterprising, confidence, management, influence, facilitation, consideration, analytics, performance, organizing behaviour, resilience and enterprising nature. Each of these domains has a number of characteristics under them like independence, adaptability, planning, quality orientation, problem-solving approach, conceptualizing vision and customer orientation to name a few (Buono and Jamieson, 2010). Empirical studies conducted in the past have revealed that the hiring of consultants by organizations is dependent on the fact that whether the consultants are being able to transfer their competence to the organization. A set of exhaustive attributes were identified by Rynning (1992) that contributes to the success of projects in organizations. These attributes could be equated with the competency of the management consultant and comprised clarity in indentifying the problems, ability to produce new ideas, special planning, innovative thinking, time management, efficiency of execution, strategy formulation and cost savings. The research of Carucci and Tetenbaum (2000) had established that the consultant manager can contribute negatively to the performance of the organization if he assumes the role of messiah, colluder and dependency builder. Therefore organizations should be careful in avoiding consultants with these type of characteristics as they are not competent enough. Researchers O’Driscoll and Eubanks (1993) had developed the behavioural competency model to describe the process of organizational development by taking into account about the competency of the consultants and goal setting activities to improve organizational effectiveness. It can therefore be argued that the competency of the consultant is equally important to drive the organizational performance. The aspect of organizational characteristics plays an important aspect from the point of view of the consultants in delivering their performance. Consultants expect that their clients must be bright and willing to learn, accepting feedback provided by them in a non-defensive manner, risk-lover and willing to accept challenges in the advice and provide every necessary information to the consultants. Works of Carucci and Tetenbaum (2000) had also confirmed that consultants believe in order for them to deliver a good performance it is important that the client organization is optimistic with a result oriented approach, self-confident and filled with intellectual curiosity. The research conducted by Burke, Clark and Koopmane, (1984) had revealed that the success and failure of projects undertaken by and organization and its long-term growth thereby depends on the way in which they accept the consulting advice received by the consultant. It has been found that if the organizations are ready to accept the changes and willing to take responsibility in the entry phase of the consulting process then this will lead to success of the project in the long-run. In the diagnostic phase of the consulting phase the client organization must be willing to share information with the consultant managers to ensure that they have access to all the required material. Finally, in the feedback phase client organization must show confidence in implementing the suggestions provided by the consultant manager. Fullerton and West (1996) had suggested that it is important for the organization to be transparent in their query. Management must have effective communication skills and provide a clear idea about their own needs. Requirement of organizational leverage is also an important factor to work in accordance to the recommendations provided by the consultants. The existing literature shows that the previous researchers have worked extensively to establish the fact that competency of consultants is a key factor that propels the success of the consulting process itself. Additionally the nature of the organization and its characteristics are also important to ensure that the recommendations provided by the consultant will be useful in creating a successful consultation process. The purpose of this research is to explore this topic in more details and supplement the existing literature about this topic. Research Aims and Objectives ` The aim of this research is to explore the competencies that are required by consultants in order to ensure an efficient consulting practice. The secondary aim of the research is to explore the organizational characteristics those are required by the consultants to deliver their performance. Based on the research aim the research objectives are: To analyze the competencies of consultant those are required for delivering an efficient consulting performance. To analyze the organizational characteristics that allows effective functioning of the consultant recommendations. To collect first hand information about the set of core competencies desired from consultants. To collect first hand information about the organizational characteristics desired by consultants for their smooth learning. To provide recommendations for improvement in future. Research Question Based on the research aims and objectives the research the research questions can be framed in the following manner. What is the influence of the competence of the consultant on consulting performance? Which organizational characteristics help in improving the consulting performance of the consultants? Research Methodology Research philosophy In order to conduct a research in an effective manner it is important to establish the research philosophy the researcher wants to adopt (Sparkes and Smith, 2013). Researchers have identified that there are two research philosophies that can be undertaken by the researcher namely positivism and interpretivism. If the researcher adopts a positivist approach then this implies that the researcher wants to establish a relationship between the research parameters by adopting a mathematical approach on the other hand adopting an interpretivist stance assumes that the researcher explores the attitude and the mind-set of the respondents by interacting with them (Gratton and Jones, 2010). This research plans to use a positivist stance because the theories are already present and the researcher wishes to test hypothesis based on statistical results. The researcher has chosen not to use the interpretivist stance because it would require investing great deal of time and energy. Approach to theory There are two types of research approach that can be adopted by a researcher namely deductive approach and inductive approach. In a deductive approach the researcher works on the basis of an existing theoretical framework and applies existing theory. On the other hand in an inductive approach the researcher expands the existing theories and this process has also been termed as a theory building process (Kotler, 2011). In this approach the researcher collects observations and tries to generalize the outcome from the research. This research wishes to use an inductive approach and explore the attributes of competence and organizational characteristics that drives the consulting success. The researcher wants to expand the existing theories in the consulting management literature by collecting and testing observations. Research Strategy Researcher can use either qualitative or quantitative research strategy in order to conduct a research. In a quantitative approach the researcher wants to measure the relationship between the dependent and the independent variables of the research based on mathematical and statistical techniques. In a qualitative research the researcher, the researcher relies on non-numeric parameters in order to answer the research question (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). Researcher has a wide choice of techniques in order to conduct qualitative research namely open-ended interviews, in-depth interviews, case study development, and semi-structured interviews to conduct a research. Researcher can also use a mixed methodology in order to conduct a research (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhil, 2012). Application of mixed methodology enhances the research triangulation by comparing the research findings of the qualitative and quantitative research. This research wishes to use a mixed methodology to improve the robustness of the results obtained from the research. The reason for incorporating the qualitative research was to make sure that the researcher is able to obtain a clear understanding about the mind-set of the respondents by interacting with them. Qualitative research helps to understand about the reasons and motivations that drive the behaviour of the respondents. The rationale for including the quantitative research was to guarantee that the results obtained from the research could be generalized. The researcher wishes to measure the impacts of the main factors that propel the consulting performance. Finally, the researcher has used a positivist stance and a quantitative approach is useful for a quantitative methodology. Method of data collection The method of data collection in a research depends on the type of the research design that has been chosen by the researcher. Researchers like Bryman and Bell (2007) have pointed out that the data collection technique depends on the type of data that is to be collected by the researcher. Primary and secondary data are the two types of data that are collected by researchers to conduct research. Primary data is basically customized data collected by the researcher for the purpose of answering the research question. Primary data is raw and unprocessed and requires considerable processing before they can be interpreted (McDaniel and Gates, 1998). Secondary data on the other hand represents any data that has been collected by other researchers for the purpose of their own research. These data are processed and have undergone some sort of tests by statistical or non-statistical techniques. This research has planned to use both primary and secondary data for the purpose of research. The section of literature review will be built on the basis of secondary data that will provide the basic framework for the rest of the paper. Secondary data will be collected from the internet, online and printed journals, newspaper articles, related works of other researchers published on internet and so on and so forth. Primary data will also be collected by the researcher by applying techniques suitable for qualitative and quantitative research. The researcher plans to use questionnaire survey to collect data for quantitative research and focus group interviews to collect data for qualitative research. Researchers have confirmed that questionnaire survey is one of the fastest methods to collect data where the respondents provide consistent answers based on pre-determined questions. The rationale for choosing the focus group interview is to guarantee that there occurs a great deal of interaction among the respondents within a short span of time. Focus group interviews also incorporates a “group element” in the research which is absent in questionnaire method. Reliability and Validity Reliability and validity of the research are ways in which the robustness of results can be verified. Reliability testing of a research is done to verify whether the research generates consistent results (Ariola, 2006). Reliability of the research will be tested by applying the Cronbachs alpha. Researchers can use internal and external validity testing to make sure that they have used quality data in their research. Internal validity testing can be done by applying statistical and non-statistical techniques to eliminate the impact of extraneous variables on independent variable. External validity on the other hand refers to the extent to which the research results can be generalized (McBurney and White, 2009). This research will apply only measures of internal validity testing like using statistical methods. The time and scope of research will make it difficult to apply any type of measures of external validity of research. It has been established that it is difficult to focus on both internal and external validity as ensuring internal validity reduces the scope of external validity and vice versa. Therefore this approach adopted by the researcher can be considered as a justified one. Ethical considerations Involvement of human respondents in the research raises the concern of ethical considerations for the researcher. The researcher will have to ensure that the anonymity of the respondents is maintained after the research. The researcher also has to ensure that the respondents are provided full autonomy in answering the research questions in order to avoid them from any type of influence of the researcher. All the respondents involved in the research must be fully informed about the nature of the research to allow them to assess the potential risks and benefits of the research process. All the respondents must be treated fairly in the research and the researcher should not treat any respondent with special attention (Bernard, 2000). Time Line Activity/ Time M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 Overall design of the study                     Collecting the Primary Data based on Questionnaire Survey                     Conducting the Focused Group Interviews                     Colleting the Secondary data from internet, journals, government publications                     Analysis of the data obtained                     Writing the thesis                     Resources required The researcher will need time to collect the data from the respondents by using questionnaire methods and focus group interview. The researcher has assumed it would take nearly four months to conduct this process. Once all the primary and secondary data is collected the researcher plans to use SPSS software to analyze the data. Analysis of the data has been made with the help of multiple regression analysis, One Way ANOVA descriptive statistics and correlation analysis by using SPSS Version 2.0. Summary The role of consultants in the management literarture has received considerable importance in the last three decades. Many researchers have taken independent approaches to establish the role management consultants play in organizational performance. This research in particular focuses on the competence of the consultants in providing effective consulting service to the client organization. Furthermore the organizational characteristics needed by the consultants to perform their duties have also been discussed. This research plans to use mixed methodology to answer the research questions. Primary data is to be collected by methods of focus group interviews and questionnaire surveys in accordance with qualitative and quantitative research respectively. Internet, journals and books will form the source for secondary data. The research will primarily rely on internal validity measures to verify robustness of results. Cronbach alpha will be implemented to check the validity of the research. Finally, the data obtained from focus group interviews will be used to prepare questionnaires to conduct quantitative research. SPSS 2.0 will be used to analyze the data collected from questionnaires. Reference List Ariola, M.M., 2006. Principles and methods of research. Phillipines: Rex Bookstore, Inc. Bernard, R., 2000. Social research methods: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. London: Sage Publications. Bryman, A. and Bell, E., 2007. Business research methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buono, A. F. and Jamieson, D.W., 2010. Consultation for organizational change. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Burke, W. W., Clark, L. P. and Koopmane, C., 1984. Improve your OD project’s chances for success. 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