Innovations in the Theory and Practice of Staff Development

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  • スタッフ・ディベロップメント論のイノベーション
  • スタッフ ディベロップメントロン ノ イノベーション

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Abstract

<p>　 Expectations are rising that Staff Development (SD) of university administrators and other staff can be seen as a key means of realizing radical reform and enabling universities in Japan to cope with the worsening of their management environment. Within academia, SD has been recognized over the past 10 years as an important field of study, and the results developed in the course of this studyhave played an important role in providing encouragement, and at times in giving theoretical support to arguments, or in satisfying the thirst for learning among eager university administrators. At the same time, social awareness of the need for SD has risen, and what is now in the process of developing is a demand for SD to provide responses to problem areas with a high degree of individual specificity.</p><p>　 However, the reality is that at the present time, SD is no more than one device which has the potential to increase the level of efficiency and sophistication of university management. What should happen is that persuasive discussion concerning the fundamental usefulness of SD is developed, and that clarification is provided on how to use SD efficiently for the training of high-level administrative staff, but in fact, as a result of an “authoritarian type of thinking,” SD discussions make hardly any attempt to deal with these issues. Only recently, at long last, has the importance of linking SD to performance, including graduate school education, been acknowledged and a start made on trying to formulate policies to achieve this aim.</p><p>　 On the other hand, the level of understanding of the present state of SD, an indispensable issue when thinking about the role that SD should play in the future, cannot be said to be adequate. For example, university administrators are faced on the hand with demands to raise the level of efficiency and sophistication in dealing with traditional routine tasks, and on the other, with new demands to develop skills in such areas as planning, project management, problem identification, and others. Caught between these two sets of opposing demands, administrators are being torn apart. As with other issues referred to above, it can also be said in relation to these important new trends that they are hardly understood at all by traditional discussions on SD.</p><p>　 In the context of difficult circumstances of this kind, this paper reports on an intensive investigation and analysis of a pioneering training project implemented in Japan. The results can be defined as the identification of the possibility of a new framework, namely on-the-job development×development (OJD2), within SD, taking the form of a new kind of project management, whereby the implementation of tasks functions as training, so that an increased level of efficiency and sophistication are realized together, and at the same time, the new practical abilities demanded of the person carrying out the tasks are gradually enhanced. The paper also shows how a management style is already being developed in the form of a functioning business process training program in its entirety in advanced university environments as an extension of this kind of initiative.</p>

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