Article Critique - Hutchinson, A. & Boxall, P - Assessment Answer

Article Critique Assignment

Assignment Task

The article that you must read and critically assess is:

o Hutchinson, A. & Boxall, P. (2014), ‘The critical challenges facing New

Zealand’s chief executives: implications for management skills’, Asia

Pacific Journal of Human Resources, vol.52, pp.23-41.

The Article Critique that you write must:

o Identify a relevant Thesis Statement or Question from the article

o Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article based on the Thesis Statement

o Provide your own viewpoint – what do you believe?

o Do you agree with the thesis statement of the article or don’t agree?

o State your key points and Why? Why not?

o Provide evidence and research from other academic sources (at least

3) to support and back your argument

o Show use and understanding of class concepts learned in class thatrelates to the subject of the article

o A solid conclusion to your essay

The article, “The critical challenges facing New Zealand's chief executives: implications for management skills”, by Ann Hutchison & Peter Boxall seeks to address and examine the most significant and serious challenges in the existing environment, and its repercussion for the management skills of New Zealand. It also discusses the role of human resource in skill development.

It is very evident from the article abstract that, it focuses on some of the major issues. The relevant thesis question from the article is How a chief executive responses to the various opportunities and threats that exists in its environment? The day to day as well as the most severe challenges and risks they face while sitting at the top of the pyramid? And what are the most significant issues and their implications in the current environment? This article also discusses the chief executives inherently versatile and integrative role, identifying the important management skills and its implications and how specialists from Human resource can help in development?

New Zealand has suffered low economic growth rate after the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis. Even though New Zealand has prospect of growths, there is a continuous skill drain in search of better career option. The article presents qualitative and quantitative analysis of survey involving 265 chief executives from New Zealand. It examines the existing HR Functions and the inference for management development.

Strength and Weaknesses

The article discusses some of the key features of current management setup and a review of the some of the existing research on management capabilities. Based on this discussion the article presents some of the strength and weakness which are as follows:-

Strength

Even though New Zealand is a small economy of 4.5 million, it is one of the leading players in Dairy Industry. It has a small number of organizations of global reach. The kind of business and consumer service which New Zealand has is generally expected to exist in an advanced economy. It is of advantage that organizations in New Zealand are less Bureaucratic. They provide there employees with greater job autonomy and have good quality of life. In smaller or informal kinds of organizations the management style seems to be more empowering.

New Zealand being a world class player in dairy industry, it has no company that can reach to Fortune Global 500 list. Much of the business and services are of foreign ownership, lack of progression, recruiting and retaining is a fundamental problem due to absence of specialized roles.

The article presents an original study undertaking 265 chief executives from 27% of the largest organizations of the nation. The organizations size and selection criteria was the based on the number of full time staffs it has. Thus organizations with more than 100 full time staffs were included in this study.

Organization of public, private as well as not-for-profit sectors actively participated in this study. Thus it was insured that a wide range of industries are included which results in appropriate representation of all the sectors. The sample included industries like banking, hospitality, media, construction, dairy, social service central government, charity, health, agriculture etc.

Likert scale is used as a rating tool for the list of challenges and risks faced by organizations. This risk and challenges were identified and complied by taking into consideration all the possible areas of business. The quantitative section of the study included 5 open-ended questions giving the respondents the freedom to further explain and be more open to the underlining issues existing in their organization. The result data of private and other sectors are presented separately the data being slightly different between profit and non-profit organizations. This will give a clear understanding of the different kinds of risks and challenges being faced by different sectors.

Weakness

The survey was aimed and sent to 1000 organizations based on their size. It was observed that nineteen organizations returned and refused to participate in the study. The 981 surveys were accepted but only 265 chief executives from these organizations participated. Even though we can say the study has a good respondent base, but it does not represents and completes the targeted number of participants. The survey has a response rate of only 27%. Thus the study cannot be claimed to be representing a complete picture of the issues and challenges as it covers only 1/4th of the potential respondents.

The author mentions the limitations of the analysis, such as even though the study gives a fuller picture the opinion of more than one respondent was required, the data collected are descriptive in nature and thus it does not effectively measure the assessment of chief executives. This study would need a further research of how the chief executives react to the analysis presented, and to find out the points that have been missed in this paper like the any skill group missed organizations that are not a part of this study etc. Further exploring as to which manager currently demonstrates the identified capabilities and development strategies, that can be effective for various organizations in New Zealand.

View Point

The study reveals the rapid changing market and technologies. This fast changing environment comes with more cautious and restrictive support from the stakeholders and funders. There is a war for talent in such a constrained environment. In my view point the researcher has justified the article’s thesis statement by bringing down the study results into few key points. The study presents three essential skills that any organizations management needs i.e. Managing people and resources that the limited, stake holders and business partners who are already being conditional and managing uncertainty and renewal of this rapidly changing environment. The managers need to have the capabilities to handle the situation of uncertainty. They need the skill to tactfully manage the stakeholders and partners, and the organizations should invest time and effort to design and mold the skill development process.

The study reveals the top five challenges and the riskiest issues that are being faced by the 3 different sectors. For example- market risk, access to finance and dialogues with shareholders were the top 3 challenges as per the private sector analysis data. Public sector and Non – profit seeking sector demonstrated a similar study outline. They indicated fund raising as the biggest challenge apart from coping with the changes of economic climate and government regulation compliance as there major issues. With such extremely challenging economic situation the focus should be on lifting the medium term economic performance (The Treasury, 2008).

The open-ended questions extensively elaborated the issues further. It was identified that there is a severe skill shortage in all the sectors, levels or professions. In public and not for profit sectors there is a major drop in revenue. The revenue drop along with the escalating cost is making these organizations extremely difficult to operate. It was also found that different organizations handle these escalating costs in different ways. For few it resulted in compromising with the quality. Others faced difficulties in attracting the talents, rewarding the talent or retaining them.

When the overall study is analyzed, it is seen that the chief executives from all the sectors are trying to adjust with the extremely challenging rapidly changing economic environment. Both the sectors are also in a war of talent. Their main concern is the significance of their organizations business model and how to reinvent and match it in an effective way.

The existing issue implies a need to induce necessary changes, think creatively and be more versatile in their approach.

Research Evidence

According to Global Competitive Report, the top 5 most problematic factors for doing business in New Zealand are inadequate supply of infrastructure, inefficient government bureaucracy, insufficient capacity to innovate, access to finance and inadequate educated workforce. On a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being the most problematic in the efficiency enhancers factors the market size scored 3.9, the business sophistication and Innovation was scored 4.8 & 4.4 respectively, the government procurement of advanced tech products scored 3.4 & company spending on research and development scored 3.8. Further Burden of government regulation scored 4.1, Inflation, annual % change was 1.1, country capacity to retain talent and the domestic market size index scored 3.7(Schwab and Sala-i-Martin, 2014).

The Future State report from Institute of Policy studies states two major challenges faced are small domestic market due to small population & there is no benefit of innovation in the smaller economy. The smaller and slow capital market makes it difficult for the organizations to adopt new technologies thereby affecting the productivity. The productivity gap is one of the major concerns of the policy makers in New Zealand (Gill, D., Pride, S., Gilbert, H. and Norman, R, 2010).

As stated above there are evidence and research which supports and the current thesis statement of this article by reaching to the similar conclusion of challenges and risks involved.

Conclusion

Overall it as a very well written article representing one of the important and major issues New Zealand is facing. The different pieces of research when taken as a whole is significant and compelling in theory, but it does not present a concrete approach towards the complex problems of organization. It presents the qualitative analysis and cannot be measured in terms of intensity. The article’s outcomes and results are proved and backed by reports with similar research results which already exist. While the study has virtues the technique needs to be re-evaluated and reframed. The intensity of the study can be increased by targeting large sample size. The article concludes by pointing out the key role of the HR specialist in whole development process. The article is a very convincing piece of study in theory and there is a need to focus and tackle a very tangible approach to the issues and challenges.