Predicting the Impact of Managerial Competencies on the Behavioral Outcomes of Employees in the Selected Manufacturing Firms in Nigeria

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. The paper has a similarity index of 12%. This is highly commendable. 

2. The paper is well-written and the problem statement is supported with theoretical and empirical justifications. Prevalent issues of managerial competencies were clearly stated but these can still be improved on. What are the basic gaps in literature? This should be clearly identified to prove the necessity for this study.

3. The methodology has adequate information and justification but can still be strengthened with sufficient justifications.

4. The authors should improve on the discussions of findings.

5. What are the major policy and managerial implications of this study?

6. The authors need to highlight directions for future inquiry.

7. The major contributions to knowledge should be highlighted and more robust.

8. The references section and currency of literature are duly appreciated.

 

Accept after minor corrections

Author Response

Thank you for these wonderful observations. It is well appreciated. The corrections have been duly effected. Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for inviting me to review this research work. The authors proposed interesting research questions and introduced the study in a concise way. I hope the following comments, which serve as sincere suggestions instead of criticisms, can help authors to further improve the manuscript. Unfortunately, it seems that the manuscript bears several notable shortcomings in research design and methodology.

Research design:

1.     Type of study: while the manuscript clearly proposed explanatory research questions and used typical methodologies in explanatory studies, it did not develop any hypothesis nor use theories to suggest logical relationships between constructs, which explanatory studies usually do. A hypothesis is a totally different thing from a research question. Typically, readers of such an explanatory manuscript would expect a series of well-developed hypotheses, such as “H1: higher global awareness competence is positively related to employee behavioral outcomes” with appropriate literature to support it. It made me even more confused when the authors mentioned “to test the hypothesis” on p.9 and discussed the hypothesis on p.12-15 since I found no hypothesis development in the manuscript.

2.     Logical flow: overall, the manuscript suffers from a rather weak logical flow, and the absence of hypotheses is probably the most notable consequence. Frequently, I even felt a lack of logical relationships between lines. For example, in p.1 line 15, the authors mentioned that “behind in realizing the benefits of technology” is a problem while other content did not pay attention to technology. I also could not see any logical relationship between the importance of the manufacturing industry and the importance of employee behaviors in p.2 lines 42-46. It felt like something was missing in between. Sometimes the same issue appeared in other lines as well.

3.     Novelty: the authors wrote that there is a literature gap on “the relationship between managerial competencies and employee behavioral outcomes” in p.3 lines 105-106. This argument, unfortunately, was not persuasive. As the authors did not define “employee behavioral outcomes”, I took the conventional definition. According to the conventional scope of behavioral outcomes, there are many very established studies focusing on the relationship between managerial competencies and employee behavioral outcomes (e.g., Shipper & Davy, 2002). I felt confused with the components of employee behavioral outcomes in the manuscript. While conventionally the construct refers to induced employee behaviors such as employee commitment or turnover intention (e.g., Shipper & Davy, 2002; Takeuchi & Takeuchi, 2013), this manuscript used managers’ perceived benefits and challenges of managerial competencies to represent employee behavioral outcomes. It is probably better to provide justifications for such an unusual approach.

Methodology:

1.     Reliability of data: managerial competence and behavioral outcomes include dimensional variables. It is inappropriate to use mean Alpha or AVE to justify their measurement reliability (p. 6) because it conceptually does not make sense (conceptually, items should load to different dimensions). If authors prefer to use the two constructs as higher order latent variables, it is better to provide further methodological justifications, such as a second order CFA to justify the measurement validity. Besides, the measurements of SAC may not have sufficient reliability since loadings of two items are below 0.7. The authors used cross-sectional data, but provided no information on detecting or controlling common method variance (such as Harman’s single factor or common latent factor, etc.), which also reduced the reliability of the collected data.

2.     Statistical effectiveness: the study collected 121 samples from managers. The rather small sample size may reduce the validity of statistical results, especially for cross-sectional data. Scholars conventionally take at least 200 samples to support a statistically effective model.  

Another rather minor comment is the writing style. I noticed many assertive presentations such as “must” in the manuscript. This is rather unusual in academic writing because we hardly have absolute truth in social science and there are always different opinions, so strongly assertive statements can hardly keep academic rigor.

 

References:

Shipper, F., & Davy, J. (2002). A model and investigation of managerial skills, employees' attitudes, and managerial performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 13(2), 95-120.

 

Takeuchi, N., & Takeuchi, T. (2013). Committed to the organization or the job? Effects of perceived HRM practices on employees' behavioral outcomes in the Japanese healthcare industry. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24(11), 2089-2106.

Author Response

Thank you for these wonderful observations. It is well appreciated. The corrections have been duly effected. Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

First, I would like to thank the authors for the opportunity to read this paper. The subject is interesting and has potential of further development.

However, please consider the following recommendations in order to enhance the present quality of the paper, as the scientific soundness and both the overall construction of the article needs improvement.

1. There are parts of the paper already marked with colors (please see page 1 - yellow and green). I did not understand the meaning of these...

2. At the end of section 1, Introduction, the authors state four research questions. Even if the information in section 2 Literature review deals with the aspects listed under the designation of the four research question, I highly recommend creating a more clearer linkage between. For example, which information addressed the first RQ and how? The theory must constitute the foundation for the applicative study, so a clear link between the ideas must be drawn.

3. The Methodology section - it is too vague, please be more specific

4. Section 4 - Analysis and discussions - table 3 - what does OND/NCE mean? When using abbreviations, please define them.

5. In part 4.3, the following statement is made: „To test the hypothesis, structural equation modelling was used”. Which is / which are the hypothesis to be tested? Up to this point we only had four research questions mentioned in section 1, but no linkage between these RQ, theory and results were mentioned.

6. Discussions of findings

The following statement is made: „The first hypothesis predicted that global awareness competency has a significant 351 influence on employees’ behavioural outcomes in the selected manufacturing firms”... Where do we find this hypothesis proposed to be tested?

Same for the statements: „The second hypothesis predicted that communication competency has a significant influence on employees’ behavioural outcomes in the selected manufacturing firms”, „The third hypothesis predicted that strategic action competency has a significant influence on employees’ behavioural outcomes in the selected manufacturing firms”, „The fourth hypothesis predicted a significant influence of self-management competency on employees’ behavioural outcomes in the selected manufacturing firms”. Are these mentions of the research questions?

7 The conclusions are vague and not enough supported by the results.

Author Response

Thank you for these wonderful observations. It is well appreciated. The corrections have been duly effected. Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for offering the revision. I hope the following comments would help the authors to further improve the manuscript.

·      The logical flows between paragraphs and sentences were still rather weak. The literature review and hypothesis development sections were repetitive with each other and could be integrated better. The hypothesis development section did not really explain why these hypotheses were reasonable, particularly for global awareness. Instead, it repetitively described the definition of constructs, which the literature review section already did. The theoretical justification section took the generic framework of RBV and did not integrate RBV well with other parts. While theories should serve as the foundation of research, RBV here acts as a patch of convenience. I would not encourage such an approach.

·      The authors measured employee behavioral outcomes with managers’ perceived benefits and challenges of managerial competencies. I personally doubt why managers’ perceptions could represent the rather subjective behavioral outcome of employees. I still did not find justifications or improvements for this pitfall in the new version. It is more appropriate to collect the employee behavioral outcomes from employees instead of managers. One may ask managers about employees’ objective outcomes such as job performance measured in a standard format, but employees’ behavioral outcome is not really within the scope of managers’ easy observation.

·      The authors only report superordinate Alpha, AVE and composite reliability of managerial competence and behavioral outcomes which include dimensional variables. I would like to see indicators for each dimensional variable if they did not load to a single factor. Otherwise, it is better to have higher-order modes to justify that different dimensions would load to a single factor.

·       CMV is rooted in the single method. Many pitfalls can induce CMV such as respondents' social desirability. Although multicollinearity may result in part of CMV, it cannot tell the full story. Therefore, using VIF to waive CMV is a rather unreliable approach. I did not see Bagozzi & Youjae say anything about the threshold of VIF 3.3 to waive CMV. Instead, they did mention that ”when a single measurement procedure is used, it is not possible to disentangle true convergence from method bias.”

 

·     The authors replaced all “must” with “should”. Unfortunately, this would not change the tone of sentences. They are still very assertive and not rigorous. Overall, the English writing is rather difficult to follow since the manuscript included many passive voices and tangled sentences.

Author Response

All the corrections have been effected.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors managed to improve the paper by referring to most of the recommendations made by the reviewer. 

Please see part 1.6. and state also the linkage between the research questions proposed to be answered and the hypothesis to be tested.

Please revise section 4. The Discussion and Conclusions should be two separate sections of the paper. Of course, the conclusions must be more detailed than in the previous version of the paper.

Author Response

All the corrections have been effected.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx