John Bigelow

June, 1992

Management Department

Boise State University

1910 University Drive

Boise, ID 83725

(208)385-1267 (work)

(208)385-1857 (FAX)

Abstract

The skill topics learning activities, and supplemental materials available with each of nine recently released or revised skills texts are described. The texts vary in their scope and in the weight given to skills vs. cognitive learning. Most draw on a social learning model involving skill preassessment, conceptual learning, conceptual and behavioral practice, and life application. Considerations in choosing a text are discussed. Finally, recommendations are made for incorporating recent advances in skill knowledge with the use of these texts. These include more attention to obstacles, more emphasis on practice, avoiding a "one best way" impression, rewarding skillfulness, providing for skill integration, and better links between concepts and skill advancement.

Managerial Skills Texts: How do They Stack Up?

In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of university level managerial skills texts. Whereas prior to 1988 only one or two skills texts were available, skills instructors can now choose from more than nine. Because managerial skill learning is an emerging area, these texts do more than simply collect what we know about skills. Rather, they represent attempts by authors to define the scope, content, and pedagogy of managerial skills.

The growing numbers of these texts creates a problem for skill teachers trying to stay up with what's available. What is in these texts? What kind of learning do they make possible? How do they differ from one another?

The purpose of this article is twofold. The first is to comparatively describe these texts and what they are designed to accomplish. The second purpose concerns going beyond these texts in teaching skills. Because of the inevitable lag involved in creating a text, none of these texts represent all that we have learned about skill learning. The second purpose of this article, then, is to provide some supplemental suggestions for how to move closer to the state of the art in using these texts.

The Texts

Currently there are at least nine texts which are presented as university level skills-oriented texts and which address management topics. Below, I briefly introduce these texts. They are in alphabetical order by first author.

I have come across one other book which is very much in the spirit of a skills approach. It is Bolton's "People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts". It is "..written for people with a strong enough desire to improve their relationships that will experiment with the approaches to communication outlined in the following pages." (Preface, p. xiii). The book discusses a variety of people skills at a practical level and provides guidelines for practice. Since it is not a skills text (i.e., it provides no learning activities and has no instructor's manual), I will not review this book.

Comparative Analysis

Each of these texts is a package of resources which may be used to accomplish certain educational objectives. What's in each of these packages? What course goals can they facilitate? Below I describe the specific skill topics each text addresses, the learning activities included with each text, and the supplemental materials available with each text. I then consider the goals each text seems designed to accomplish, and discuss some considerations in choosing a text.

All but the Keleman and Garcia text are organized into chapters which address specific skill-related topics. Table 1 summarizes the major skill areas each text addresses.

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Many of these additional topics seem reasonable to include in a skills course. Instructors may find these topics attractive or not, according to their own course needs and sense of appropriateness. Instructors considering these texts, however, should realize that for a given topic, skill learning takes considerably more time than does cognitive learning. While additional topics may seem logical and useful, they can also crowd out the time needed for skill learning.

Each text provided materials needed for a variety of learning activities. These activities are listed in Table 2.

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This table shows that most of the texts provide a fairly similar set of activities, such as self-assessment instruments, readings, role plays, and exercises. As seen above with skill topics, some texts included some additional learning activities. The Lewis text was unique in its inclusion of comments from practicing managers. The Quinn text was unique in its use of an overarching "competing values" model. The Lussier text provided a series of activities directed toward the cognitive aspect of skill learning. Robbins provided multiple choice exams (with answers following) in the text as a way of reinforcing chapter concepts.

The Rue text was mainly organized around conceptual learning activities. The others, however, were generally organized around a multistep learning model, similar to the social learning model proposed by Bandura (1977). Whetten introduced a variation of this model in 1983, and others seemed to generally follow his precedent. A generalized summary of the steps of this model is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Generalized Steps in Skill Learning

Most texts began skill units with some form of preassessment activity intended to provide students with some insight into their current skill level. This was followed by readings designed to provide a conceptual understanding of the skill. Some texts included skill modeling (i.e., demonstration of competent skill use) at this point. Following this, students practiced applying their understanding. This practice usually took place in two phases: The first phase involved practice in applying concepts to cases and other situations; the second phase involved live skill practice in role-playing situations and exercises, often followed by feedback from students using behavioral guideline checklists. The final step was assignments designed to encourage skill application outside the classroom in natural life settings.

For each of the texts there was an accompanying instructor's manual. For some texts other supplementary materials were also available. Table 3 lists these resources for each text.

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This table is subdivided into three types of instructional aids, for teaching, examinations, and alternative pedagogies. All the manuals provided help for conducting sessions, and most provided some help in how to organize the course as a whole. Support for examinations was sporadic, with the Lussier, Rue and Whetten texts providing the most examination materials. Many of these examination materials, however, seemed geared toward measuring cognitive accomplishment--not skill learning. Again, support for using particular pedagogies was sporadic. The Whetten text provided support for a broad range of additional pedagogies. The Keleman, Quinn, Whetten, and Yukl texts provided support for the important pedagogy of role playing. Some more unique pedagogical support was provided as well. For example, the Keleman text considered videotaping by students, The Lewis and Rue texts provided computer simulations, the Lussier text provided video scripts, the Quinn and Whetten texts provided support for team learning, and the Maniero text discussed establishing student learning contracts.

In sum, all the instructor manuals provided useful support for instructors, though some limited this support to teaching. Some provided examination materials, and most provided support for some skill-related pedagogies. The Whetten text stood out in its range of supplementary materials, although the Quinn, Lewis, and Lussier texts also provided strong support.

Each text contained an introduction which included directly or indirectly stated goals for the text, and these were cited above in the introduction to the texts. In addition, most of the texts included learning objectives for each section. However, none of the texts included a central statement indicating what students could expect to learn by going through the text and activities. It is possible, however, to make some inferences about the general goal directions of each text, based on their content, learning activities, and examination procedures.

The texts' goals differ from one another along two main dimensions. The first is goal focus. Some texts are primarily oriented toward skill learning, while others are also designed so as to accomplish somewhat distinct cognitive goals. The Lussier text for example, with its listing of key terms, concept application questions, and reading review sections, is clearly designed not only for skill learning, but also for concept mastery as well. The Whetten text explicitly states in the introduction that theoretical learning is one of its goals.

The second goal dimension concerns scope. Some texts are fairly focused in the range of topics covered, while others go beyond the usual skill areas to cover such topics as social responsibility, equal opportunity, organization structure, and managing information overload. The scope of each these texts seems to fall into one of three categories: (1) A focus on interpersonal skills only, (2) a focus on managerial skills, and (3) a coverage of topics usually covered in an OB course. These three scopes may be thought of as nested circles, with interpersonal in the center, managerial in the middle, and OB in the outer circle. Thus, the managerial scope includes the interpersonal, and the OB scope includes managerial topics.

The relation of each text to these two goal dimensions is illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Focus and Scope of Goals for Each Text

In this figure the focus dimension is shown vertically and the scope dimension horizontally. The Robbins and Keleman texts have a mainly skill focus and an interpersonal scope. The Quinn, Whetten, Lewis, and Yukl texts have both cognitive and skills foci, and are managerial in scope. The Rue, Lussier, and Maniero texts, while still skill texts, have a somewhat larger cognitive focus, and cover topics consistent with a traditional OB course.

Figure 2 suggests a relationship between scope and focus: As the scope of the text broadens, the cognitive component of the text increases. This relationship may stem from recognition by the authors that a wider scope requires covering more material in a fixed amount of time. Thus, a text covering a wider variety of topics is likely to use a more cognitive approach in order to cover the topics more quickly. Once again this points to the importance of restricting the topic scope if one wishes to address skill learning goals.

The above discussion of goal focus and scope may be helpful to educators who need to locate a text which supports their educational objectives. An instructor who wants to add a skills component to a traditional organizational behavior course, without sacrificing too much of the topic scope and cognitive goals may want to consider the Lussier, Maniero, or perhaps the Rue text. An instructor who wants to base a course in response to popular criticisms that college graduates lack managerial skills may want to consider the Quinn, Whetten, Lewis, or Yukl texts. An instructor who wants as much impact as possible on the key area of interpersonal skills may consider the Robbins or Keleman texts--and/or supplemental use of the Bolton book.

An instructor with little experience in teaching skills should also recognize that he/she will be using a different approach in the classroom, one involving such pedagogies as self-assessment, exercises, role plays, and performance exams. The difference between a traditional class and a skills-oriented class increases as one moves downward in Figure 2; i.e., from a cognitive focus to toward an increasingly skill-oriented focus. Thus, an instructor skilled in traditional OB teaching may find the jump to the Lussier or Maniero text less wrenching than moving to some of the other texts. Alternatively, a beginning instructor may choose to supplement his/her usual text with the Robbins, Keleman, Bolton, or even Quinn texts. A beginning instructor may also find the Whetten text a good choice because of its breadth of supplementary materials. An instructor with an industry training background may find the Quinn text, with its industry training roots, more familiar. Non-traditional undergraduates and MBA students may see the Quinn text as more credible.

While the Robbins and Keleman texts are both intended as supplements, both could serve as the nucleus of a course which is intensively focused on interpersonal skills. The interpersonal area does seem to be at the heart of popularly expressed concerns about business school graduates' lack of skillfulness. Instructors wishing to make a difference might well choose one of these as a primary text. This would not be a good starting point, however, for an inexperienced instructor.

Using These Texts Well

These texts provide resources and a pedagogy by which managerial skills can be addressed in a university setting. Given how different a skills approach is to traditional university learning, this in itself is no small accomplishment. Now that a university skills learning process has been established, we are in a position to examine how it works and to consider how to make our skills learning courses increasingly effective.

Having taught a skills course since 1982, I am finding that there is more to skills and skill learning than the current literature indicates. As our knowledge of skills and skill learning increases, we can eventually expect rather different kinds of skills texts to emerge to reflect our improved understanding. Some differences which I see coming are indicated in the following discussion. For now, I think it is possible to use our developing knowledge to enhance the effectiveness of existing texts. Below I provide suggestions which instructors using current texts might consider.

1. Address previous learning and obstacles to change.

Why don't students show more evidence of managerial skill learning when entering skills courses? Authors of the texts reviewed here might assert that students are initially unskilled primarily because they haven't taken the course. We know, however, that people do in fact learn skills through trial and error in life situations. Given that students have experienced many situations in which skills may be learned, why don't they show more evidence of managerial competence?

Managerial skillfulness is based on an orientation in which the person acts to benefit others and the longer-term interests of an organization. Many students, however, are at a point in their life where their primary concerns are for their own short-term benefit. These students have in fact learned skills which allow them to cope with managerial-type situations. These skills, however, are aimed more at self-benefit, and less towards managerial accomplishment.

For example, many students are uncomfortable with certain kinds of situations, such as those involving conflict management, public speaking, and motivating others. They frequently try to deal with these situations by avoiding them. Avoidance creates a self-fulfilling cycle in which learning through experience does not take place, and lack of learning maintains a lack of confidence and continued avoidance. In skill learning courses these people may attempt to avoid or neutralize skill learning in these areas.

As another example, Rasmussen (in Bigelow, 1991) found that in many interpersonal situations, students felt it was desirable to demonstrate decisiveness. As a result, they resisted using active listening practices because they saw them as passive and a sign of weakness.

The skill learning process, then, needs to becomes something of a micro-organizational development process in which the student becomes aware of his/her present dispositions, addresses obstacles to change, and then moves to and reinforces different orientations and behaviors. Current texts do emphasize skill "preassment", but do not include the important preliminary step of "unfreezing" before moving on to establishing and "refreezing" of new behaviors. For more on how to do this, see Rasmussen on dealing with resistance, and Quinn on changing orientations through empowerment (in Bigelow, 1991).

With the exception of Keleman, the texts reviewed allocated roughly equivalent time to each of the steps of the learning model. In the "skill practice" step, most texts provided one or two role plays and/or exercises. In fact, much more time should be devoted to this step. Much of managerial skill is subconscious, and many rounds of practice are required to ingrain subconscious behaviors (McKnight, p. 217, in Bigelow, 1991). This is a basic premise of the Keleman text, which would make an appropriate supplement for each of the other texts when dealing with interpersonal topics.

In conducting skill practice rounds, it is important for students to receive effective feedback about how they are doing. Some of the texts provide this feedback through student observers with checklists and discussions following role plays. Since student effectiveness in providing feedback affects learning of other skills, it should receive early and ongoing attention throughout the course. The videotaping of role plays and use of same in feedback can significantly improve the effectiveness of skill practice rounds. The Keleman text provides some thinking on how to do this.

A caveat: instructors using much role-playing report a danger that students may tire of repeated role playing and subsequently limit their investment in role practice. This is not surprising, since skill practice in any area can be tiring, even though it is the primary source of learning. It does suggest, however, that we need to learn more about the dynamics of learning from role plays and about how to maintain student motivation in skill practice.

Skills texts are often ambitious in the amount of materials to be covered during a course. In allocating more time to skill practice, an instructor must decide what topics will be covered and in what depth. Classroom time spent on conceptual activities (e.g., lecturing, case discussions, etc.) should be kept to a minimum. In addition, some of the skills topics have less direct links to action; e.g., decision-making, planned change, power, stress and time management, creativity, goal setting, etc. Less practice time need be devoted to these topics, and some may be cut entirely in order to provide more practice time in more critical areas.

Many skill texts include a "self-awareness" section. I think that the primary function of a self-awareness section in a skills course is to enable students to raise to consciousness their previously learned orientations and skills and to assess their adequacy in managerial situations. Existing self-awareness sections are generally not well organized to do this, and need not be covered in the course.

Some texts included a "modeling" step, in which competent behaviors are demonstrated, usually through videotapes. Instructors have encountered difficulty with this step, largely because many students are at a "right-wrong dualism" stage of development where they think there is one best way to act (Gallos, 1988-9). On seeing a model, these students are likely to decide that other behavioral alternatives not explicitly demonstrated by the model are considered "wrong" and should not be used. In actuality, a number of behavioral approaches are usually possible, and a person's own style may lead to another alternative (besides the one modeled) being more effective.

Perhaps for this reason some skills texts do not include modeling as a part of their learning process, even though social learning research suggests modeling can be effective. The problem is to provide people with models without students receiving a "this is the best way" message. Some instructors respond to this problem by emphasizing that there are pros and cons to everyone's behaviors, and by providing models with both strong and weak points. Another alternative is to videotape student role plays and draw on them for models.

All the texts reviewed provided skill learning activities. The examination activities provided by most texts, however, emphasized assessment of cognitive learning through cases, essay questions, and objective/short answer questions. Only three texts (Keleman, Robbins, and Whetten) considered ways to measure actual skill attainment.

Students are very quick to realize what is rewarded in a class. If it becomes clear that examination procedures test cognitive learning, then students will place the greatest value on cognitive learning activities. Less energy will go to participation in exercises and role plays. For this reason it is important for skills courses to include skill assessment processes and to weigh them heavily in determining student grades. These activities are as important for student motivation as they are for determining student skill levels. In addition, valid indices of student skill learning provide important learning feedback for skill instructors.

All the texts except for the Keleman text were differentiated by skill topic: i.e., skills were dealt with one by one as the course progressed. We know that in actuality managers apply various skills in concert to deal with situations. This suggests that managers must not only master skills singly, but also be able to diagnose situations and array skills in order to handle them. Three texts included activities intended to help skill learners do this. The Robbins text concluded with an integrative exercise. The Quinn text concluded with an integrative reading, self-assessment, and improvement plan. The Keleman text provided integration throughout by using holistic role-plays and a problem-solving model.

The other texts seemed to implicitly assume that skill integration is not a serious problem in becoming a skilled manager. Is skill integration a serious problem for the developing skill learner, or is it perhaps "intuitively obvious" and not a difficult problem after individual skills have been learned? My sense is the former, but we are only just coming to the point where we can address this question. Perhaps we'll develop more of a sense of the importance of skill integration in the next few years.

All the texts provided conceptual readings, which ranged from the theoretical to the practical. While some texts explicitly or implicitly included cognitive learning goals, most of these readings were presumably intended to help in the process of learning skills. The rationale for including conceptual readings as a part of the skill learning process has, to my knowledge, not been well thought out. Certainly we would expect less reliance on conceptual reading when learning other skills, such as skiing or bicycle riding, and McKnight (in Bigelow, 1991) has reported success with a skill learning course that makes relatively little use of conceptual readings.

In action exam role plays with students, I have noticed that students quite often have great difficulty using conceptual materials to drive their behavior. The reason seems to be that much of skill behavior is determined by semiconscious "practice theories" (Rasmussen, in Bigelow, 1991) which exist apart from their conceptual knowledge. The simple mastery of concepts, even when the concepts are highly relevant to practice, usually has little, if any, impact on practice theories -- and therefore on a person's skillfulness.

How may conceptual materials impact on practice theories? We now know that the simple understanding of materials usually has little, if any, impact on behavior. Students have developed their own practice theories and, while willing to learn materials for the sake of a course, are quite selective about what they actually absorb and use later.

Conceptual materials have the potential for impacting on skillfulness in at least three ways. First, skillful action is often preceded by cognitive work. For example, when thinking about how to motivate another, a person may first think about the effectiveness and feasibility of various rewards, obstacles to performance, and motivational program alternatives before taking action. Cognitive materials, to the extent they are credible to students, would seem to help considerably in these pre-action steps. The trick is to get people to recall and use these materials when they are needed.

A second way that cognitive materials can impact on skillfulness is by serving as persuasive hypotheses for new behavior. If conceptual readings can point to new behaviors which address problems the skill learner is grappling with, or promise to increase the effectiveness of the learner in dealing with problems important to him or her, then the learner may be inclined to try out these behaviors, and over time, incorporate them into his/her practice theories. I do occasionally encounter students who are "ready" for the course and report great benefit from it, I think because they recognize the materials as credible approaches to dealing with ongoing issues. This possibility suggests that a skill course might well begin with self-inquiry into where the skill learner is at present and into the current and projected problems with which the skill learner is having difficulty.

A third way that cognitive materials can impact on skillfulness is by offering alternative ways of looking at situations. I suggested earlier that one of the obstacles to learning skills may be an orientation to situations which precludes the use of skills. In my experience, many students work from a basic assumption that being in a position of authority means that one has the right to order people to do things, and that people who resist should be punished. This orientation precludes use of influence approaches other than coercion. Students are often personally insecure in confrontative situations and may see conflict as an attack on their person. Such students often react to conflict with self-protective measures such as defensive statements and counter-attacking. Cognitive materials, to the extent they can help students understand their orientations and help them move to orientations which permit the possibility of skilled behaviors, can impact on skillfulness.

In determining reading assignments for a skills course, the instructor might well keep this question in mind: does this particular reading contribute to skillfulness by helping the person conceptually navigate through skill situations, by providing hypotheses for effective behavior, or by offering an alternative view which makes skilled behavior more credible? If a particular tract fulfills none of these criteria, it may not be a good reading candidate.

Conclusion

I have described the major features of nine recently released or revised skills texts. While all the texts have a significant skill component, they vary in the scope of topics addressed and in the relative weight given to cognitive vs. skill learning. Most of the texts drew explicitly or implicitly on a social learning model involving skill preassessment, conceptual learning, conceptual and behavioral practice, and life application.

I made a number of suggestions for how to improve the effectiveness of courses based on these texts, including more attention to obstacles to skill attainment, more emphasis on practice, avoiding a "one best way" impression, rewarding skillfulness, providing for skill integration, and better links between concepts and skill advancement. These suggestions may be of value to instructors wishing to obtain the greatest possible value from existing texts.

As for me, my choice of text would depend on the course for which I was preparing. If I were teaching a general OB-type course, I think I'd go with the Lussier text because of its extensive teaching manual. I don't think I'd use the Rue text. It seems highly refined as a cognitive text, but the skill component is hardly there. In teaching a managerial skills course, I think the Whetten, Quinn, and Lewis texts are all well done, and all provide good to excellent instructional support. I think I'd rotate through them as a way of maintaining variety. The Yukl text looks good, but doesn't have the same conceptual foundation or depth of support. In addition I found Prentice-Hall very difficult to work with.

If I were teaching a course on managerial interpersonal skills, I think I'd organize the course around role plays from the Keleman text. I'm very excited about holistic role plays as a pedagogical basis which can enhance skill integration and address competing practice theories. I'd also provide a resource text, to be drawn on as particular skill issues arise. The Bolton book is wonderfully written for this function. Unfortunately it addresses only three interpersonal skills--listening, assertiveness, and conflict--and does not consider them in a business context. I think I'd use the Robbins text for this purpose, since it is compact and practical. Its drawback is that it provides a number of learning activities which are made redundant by the Keleman pedagogy.

In looking over our current batch of skills texts, I am left with the feeling that we've made progress, but we still have a ways to go. The social learning model underlies most of these texts. At present, however, we have little evidence to support the university implementation of this model. My guess is that a pre-post skills test of any of these texts would prove disappointing. As a start, we urgently need to do more in developing reliable and feasible approaches to skill assessment.

As our understanding of the nature of skills deepens, so must our courses become more sophisticated in dealing with the skill learning process. I've made some suggestions earlier, and hopefully these will help in providing an agenda for authors of the next generation of skills texts. I look forward to forthcoming improvements. These are good, exciting times to be a managerial skills instructor.

Reference List

Table 1: Major areas of Skill Coverage for Each Text

* Integrated into other skill areas

Table 2: Major Learning activities included with Each Text

* Provided in instructor's supplementary material

Table 3: Supplementary Materials Available for Each Text