David L. Bradford Issue Editor
Teaching managerial skills has a long history in Organizational Behavior and Management. Although most of such instruction occurred outside of academia in training programs, individual instructors, especially those with an experiential bent, also included skill training in their courses. Most of this was on an individual-by-individual basis with few schools stressing the acquisition of these skills as a core part of their curriculum (UCLA and Case Western Reserve were probably two of the notable exceptions).
In 1977, the teaching of managerial competencies received institutional attention when the AACSB, in reviewing their accreditation policies, established a committee to investigate the possibility of using the acquisition of "noncognitive skills" as another dimension on which to base their accreditation. As Lyman Porter describes in his overview article, the AACSB in their initial phase set out to identify the various skills that should be held by graduates of a business program. They contracted with two research firms, McBer and Company and Developmental Dimensions International (DDI), to help develop the list of relevant skills and to explore different ways these could be measured. The second phase in the AACSB's activities was to determine the feasibility of measuring these competencies in an academic setting. The paper by Raymond Damm describes that process at the University of Pittsburgh. The American Management Associ ation went a step further and established a graduate program built around the acquisition of these skills. The paper by Ed Powers describes that program.
Developing parallel to these institutional efforts, individual faculty were experimenting with new approaches to teach managerial competencies. In their first article, David Whetten and Kim Cameron provide a theoretical framework for approaching this area. In their second paper, they report on how they applied this framework to a specific course. A related article is the piece by John Bigelow, who describes his efforts to develop a course built around teaching action skills. In addition to developing new ways to teach managerial competencies, attention has to be paid to the assessment process. Jim Waters and his co-authors describe a behavioral exam they have developed.
To round out this special issue, the final two papers raise some questions with the teaching of managerial competencies. I express worries about how the course is positioned in the busines school curriculum, how it is designed and how it is taught. A more fundamental criticism is raised by Peter Vaill who questions the existence of managerial competencies themselves and talks about some of the dangers with our field moving in that direction.
Taken together, I think you will find this a useful, and I hope provocative set of papers.
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