Challenges to business education: the gap between practices and expectations.

• Author: Gomes, Carlos F.
• Position: Report

1. BACKGROUND

   Economic and technological challenges are pushing business organizations to the edge were leadership can make the difference between mere survival and first-class performance. As these organizations push the boundaries of efficiency, innovation and reaching out for their customers, they are guided by visionary managers who blend their technical expertise with a renewed entrepreneurship spirit to lead their employees toward business excellence. In this context, achieving performance excellence requires the adoption of an open system business model. Such business model stresses proactive business and responsiveness to the competitive environment. Therefore, today's business organizations are in need of true leaders rather than mere managers. As a result, higher business education is being call upon to meet new challenges steaming from the realities of the innovative open system business model (Frolich & Stensaker 2010).

   In response to the open system performance demands of business organizations, institutions of higher business learning are finding it necessary to re-orient their own educational systems, programs of study and approaches to become more open in nature. As such, business education must equip its graduates with the tools, skills and attitudes needed and demanded by the business community. As a response, most of these institutions are reengineering their graduate and undergraduate programs to make them more in tone with the requirements of the new job market (Winkel 2010). These programs are being modified to stress cross disciplinary knowledge, which is based on innovative problem solving, entrepreneurship initiatives, and creative systematic thinking (Czuchry et al. 2004). In the process, they are focusing on a performance-oriented education, which emphasizes both the technical and the human aspects of organizational performance (Dodridge & Kassinopoulos 2003).

   Deregulation and increased competition within public sector institutions of a higher learning, and among these institutions and their private counterparts are forcing public sector higher learning institutions to adopt more market-like approaches. Such new approaches are changing educational practices and recruitment of potential students (Gibbs 2008). In this context, it is no surprise that business education is increasingly gaining technological, innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership flavors. This presents a departure from the lecture-based, subject-oriented, traditional mode of business education.

   The spite of the recent efforts of business education to reengineer its educational model, gaps between traditional educational preparation and recent organizational performance expectations have been subjects of concern among scholars and practitioners (Agut & Grau 2002; Agut et al. 2003; Digman 1990; King et al. 2001; Kimball 1998). The extents to which these gaps have been reduced in recent times are yet to be determined.

   The recent and diligent efforts of the European Union, which are aimed at transforming educational systems and processes in order to be more consistent with the demands of the global marketplace (Floud 2006) perhaps indicate that such gaps have not yet been eliminated. The Bologna declaration was initially signed by 29 European countries in 1999. Since that time 18 more countries have joined this effort. The main objectives of this initiative focused on the creation of a common educational system, the introduction of a unified European credit transfer system, as well as facilitating the movement of students across European countries. The ultimate goal of this joined educational effort is to create homogenous European higher educational systems. In order to accomplish this goal, comprehensive reforms of curricula and methods of delivery are promoted. In this context, educational programs are being aligned with the job market in order to improve employment prospects of graduates (Winkel 2010).

   As institutions of higher learning attempt to prepare their students for the job market, internships are being utilized as important tools (Chi & Gursoy 2009). In this context, internships are also being used to gage the current practices in business organizations. This process, in turn, can be used to obtain the needed feedback in order to reengineer the current approaches and educational emphasis of business programs.

   The research at hand attempts to facilitate and enhance the needed link between the business community and business schools through gauging the feedback obtained from internships of business students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In this process, the views of business executives on the desired performance characteristics of entering managers are correlated with the performance characteristics stressed by business schools. This line of research has direct practical implications to the business community and business schools, which are preparing future business leaders. Specifically, the first objective of this study is to assess the dimensionality of the entry-level managers' desired performance characteristics. The second objective is to gain insights into how organizations are evaluating business students, immediately after they finish their programs of study. This line of research is needed in order to close the gap between business education and the expectations of today's open system business organizations.

2. METHODOLOGY

   2.1 Instrument

   In the first phase of this research project, a questionnaire composed of thirty-seven (37) items reflecting the performance-related competencies, attitudes, and behaviors relevant to the expected performance of entry-level managers was used. For each item (characteristics) included in the research instrument, Portuguese executives were asked to classify the level of importance of the performance-related characteristic for entry-level managers on a Likert-type scale, ranging 1 to 5. Based on the analysis of the responses to this questionnaire, a set of entry-level characteristics were selected to be included in the evaluation form used for internships of undergraduate and master business students.

   In the...