Managerial Competency among Hospital Managers: Does Experience on the Job Matter?

Abstract

Managerial competency for example; being knowledgeable and skilled in programme and strategic planning is required by hospital managers to exhibit high performance results.Managing healthcare institution depends upon the key competencies of managers. There are many contributors to scaling up and improving managerial competency including formal education and various forms of informal trainings. There is also a notion that managerial competency could also be influenced by managers’ experience on the job and hence that constituted the basis for this study. Data for this study came from a cross-sectional survey distributed amongst management staff in twenty five (25) hospitals that were purposively selected. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to summarize the items of the questionnaire and to determine whether significant difference existed between groups of managers respectively. Decisions were made on all inferential statistics at 5% level of significance. A logistic regression was performed using demographic data to predict the logit of having good competency using different years of experience exposure. These statistical techniques were done using the IBM SPSS version 20. Managerial competency comparison among managers grouped by their different years of experience shows that in planning skill, vision creation skill and management/leadership skill, there was no significant competency difference among the three groups of managers: those with less than 3 years experience, those with 3-10 years experience and those with more than 10 years experience (p = .926). The results show no significant relationship between managers’ different years of experience on the job and their competency