Soft Skills and Creativity in IS Professionals · Soft Skills and Creativity in IS Professionals ... activities required to elicit user requirements. ... Soft Skills and Creativity

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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999

Soft Skills and Creativity in IS Professionals

Damien JosephNanyang Business SchoolNanyang Technological

[email protected]

Soon AngNanyang Business SchoolNanyang Technological

[email protected]

Sandra SlaughterGraduate School of Industrial

AdministrationCarnegie Mellon [email protected]

Abstract

Although the soft (i.e. non-technical) skills of information systems (I/S) professionals are recognized as imfor job performance, few attempts have been made to study systematically the concept of soft skills. We drthe pioneering work in the area of practical intelligence and creativity at the workplace to develop the concsoft skills and to validate an instrument to assess soft skills within the I/S profession. We define soft skills asself-management and self-regulation strategies for managing self; managing careers; and managing othersthe I/S work context.

A computer-based instrument is developed to elicit these strategies of I/S professionals when faced with I/Swork situations. Based on the instrument, we benchmark a group of experienced I/S professionals against a inexperienced first-year undergraduates in a computer science program. The respondents’ self-manastrategies are then evaluated for quality by a panel of senior I/S managers.

Our findings indicate that inexperienced undergraduates possess as good a set of soft skills as their expecounterparts in managing themselves, peers, and their superiors. However, experienced I/S professionals better soft skills strategies for managing subordinates, clients and vendors than do inexperienceundergraduates. The results confirm the importance of work exposure and work experience in developing soExperienced I/S professionals have been exposed to more complex situations at work and have therefore emore complex set of self-management and self-regulation strategies and mental schema. We concluimplications for selection, training, and development of I/S professionals in soft skills.

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1. INTRODUCTION

Prior research on the skills of I/S professionals hidentified and underscored the importance of soft sk(e.g., Earl 1995; Todd, McKeen & Gallupe, 1995However, little has been done beyond recognizing importance of soft skills. What is missing is a strotheoretical framework on soft skills and a way measuring soft skills.

We draw on the theories of practical intelligence Wagner and Sternberg (1985) and creativity at workSternberg, O’Hara and Lubart (1997) to understand skills of I/S professionals. We begin by defining tconcept of soft skills as a set of self-management self-regulation strategies for managing self; managcareers; and managing others within the I/S wcontext. We then describe a conceptual framework

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delineates the various dimensions of soft skills requiof I/S professionals at work. Based on our conceptframework and adopting a knowledge bamethodology, we have developed a computer-bainstrument that measures the soft skills of Iprofessionals.

To validate the instrument, we administered tinstrument to two groups of respondents with differelevels of I/S work experience: (1) an experienced groof I/S professionals with an average of three yearswork experience and (2) an inexperienced group undergraduate computer science students. A panefive senior I/S managers acted as experts to ratequality of the self-management and self-regulatistrategies elicited from the two groups. We concluwith the findings from our validation of the soft skillinstrument and outline the implications for selectio

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2. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FORSOFT SKILLS IN THE I/S PROFESSION

Sternberg, O’Hara and Lubart (1997) conceptuacreativity to be composed of six dimensionknowledge; intellectual abilities; motivation; thinkinstyles; personality; environment. They suggest tcreative performance at work is a result of tamalgamation of these components, for examfinancial investors who “defy the crowds” because thknow that “not every stock with a low price-earninratio is a good financial investment” (p. 9). Within thI/S context, effective performance at work involves nonly managing the technical but also the non-technor softer skills. The more common descriptions of sskills found in I/S literature include “people skills”“generalist skills”; and the “ability to work closely withcustomers and maintain productive user or clirelationships” (e.g., Lee, Trauth, Farwell, 1995). In tpaper, we define soft skills to represent a set of smanagement and self-regulation strategies managing self; managing careers; and managing otin resolving situations at work.

Drawing on the pioneering research in practicintelligence and tacit managerial knowledge Sternberg and his associates (Wagner and Stern1985; Wagner and Sternberg, 1990) we characterizesoft skills of I/S professionals in terms of thmanagement of four different aspects: tasks; carself; and others.

Managing Tasks refers to the self-regulation strategirequired to perform a specific piece of work. In the context, managing tasks may include knowing activities required to elicit user requiremenManaging Self refers to self-regulation strategies applying self-motivation and self-organizational aspeof individual performance with the objective oimproving one’s productivity (Wagner and Sternbe1990). In the I/S context, overcoming the problem procrastination or knowing how to prioritize projecbased on importance and urgency are examplesknowledge and skills utilized in managing seManaging Career refers to the self-managemestrategies an individual adopts to progress in his orwork life. In the I/S context, managing one’s caremay include knowing which projects to undertake advance one's technical and soft skills and hence, ocareer.

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Finally, Managing Others refers to managemenstrategies for interacting and working with others at twork place. It is perhaps the most important dimensfor the I/S profession because of the diverse groups“others” I/S professionals face in the course of thework. With outsourcing, and use of team-basorganizations, an I/S professional must learn to wonot only with his or her superior, users, and peers, also with permanent and contract subordinates, clieand vendors.

The most dominant sub-dimension of managing othis in managing subordinates. Taggart and Silby (197showed that almost half of all incidents an I/S managfaces at work are related to managing subordinatesmanaging a team of I/S professionals, the I/S manamust be aware that the interests, knowledge and skthat subordinates bring to the team may vary (Bodand Buchanan, 1992). I/S professionals must know hto manage subordinates who might either be contingworkers (managing contract subordinates) or reguemployees (managing permanent subordinateAlthough contract subordinates offer technicknowledge that the organization may lack, they cdisrupt the unity of regular employees due to their laof understanding of the organizational culture, normand practices at the work place. Peers are the I/S professional's counterparts in oI/S functions at the business unit or corporate levThese may include the regional I/S managers, Operations Manager or the I/S training andevelopment manager. As a result of mergers aacquisitions, I/S professionals from two or more legentities must often learn to work together to integrasystems from these disparate organizations. They mpossess not only the technical skills to integracomplex systems, but also a whole range of soft skto manage the smooth transition and implementationa seamless system that merges two or morganizations.

We distinguish between clients and users as two tyof stakeholders I/S professionals have to interact wfrom the user community. Clients are users that pay I/S projects while users are those that actually use system operationally. With the rising I/S sophisticatioof the user community, it is not sufficient to deliver aoperational I/S system to end-users. Rather, clients demanding that I/S professionals justify and show vafrom investments made to I/S (Boddy and Buchana1992).

Finally, with the increasing use of outsourcing, I/professionals must work with and manage vendors aconsultants (Earl, 1995). As the I/S organizatio

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undertakes partnerships and alliances with exterservice providers to serve the I/S needs of torganization, I/S professionals must develop tnecessary soft skills to select appropriate servicproviders, and develop strong vendor relationships.

Based on our conceptual framework, we proceededdevelop an instrument to elicit the self-management aself-regulation strategies of I/S professionals. Tsection below describes our methodology fodeveloping and validating this instrument.

3. DEVELOPING A COMPUTER-BASEDINSTRUMENT FOR MEASURING I/SSOFT SKILLS

We employ a knowledge base approach to develocomputer-based instrument that measures soft skillsI/S professionals. The knowledge base approa(Wagner and Sternberg, 1985) involves: (1) the criticincident methodology to develop a set of worscenarios typically encountered by an I/S professioat work; and (2) an experiment in which selmanagement and self-regulation strategies of professionals are elicited. These strategies are tevaluated in response to a variety of work situatioderived from the critical incident methodology.

The Critical Incident MethodologyTo derive a representative set of incidents and typiwork situations faced by I/S professionals, winterviewed 37 experienced I/S professionacomprising managers, project leaders and systeanalysts from both I/S vendor and user organizatioEach I/S professional was interviewed separately, aeach interview lasted between one to one and hhours. At each interview, the I/S professional was askto relate “war stories” -- typical work scenarios ansituations they faced at their workplaces. Thinterviews were tape-recorded and transcribeCollected incidents were then collated and edited. Afdiscarding duplicate incidents, we arrived at a workinsample of 125 incidents.

The 125 incidents were then classified according to soft skills framework. Two research assistants wwere unaware of the purpose of this study classified incidents into the dimensions of the framework. Thresearch assistants were initially given a random seten incidents to classify. This initial inter-ratereliability measured using Cohen's Kappa was .69The research assistants resolved coding differenccreated explicit coding rules for classification, anproceeded to classify the next set of ten incidents. Af

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the second round of classification, the inter-ratreliability improved from .699 to .896. The researcassistants continued the process of dispute resoluand classification until all 125 incidents were classifieinto their respective dimensions of soft skills in thconceptual framework.

From the 125 incidents, ten incidents were selectedbe included in the soft skills instrument. The teincidents represented a random selection of incidents appearing in each dimension of managself, task, career, superiors, subordinates (permanesubordinates (contract), peers, users, clients, vendors. A computer based soft skills instrument wdeveloped using Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 to run othe Microsoft Windows 95 platform1. The instrumentconsists of two parts: Part A presents ten work relasituations and requires the respondent to generate management and self-regulation strategies in answeeach work situation. Part B requires the respondenprovide some background and demographinformation of him or herself.

Measuring Soft SkillsTo validate the instrument, the incidents presented mable to elicit differences in self-management and seregulation strategies from groups of participants whave different levels of I/S work experience. We focon work experience as a key differentiator betwestrategies for self-management and self-regulationsoft skills are acquired from on-the-job experienc(McCall, Lombardo and Morrison, 1989).

Accordingly, we administered the computer-basinstrument to 81 respondents from two distinct groupThe first group of 27 participants was drawn frostudents in a part-time MBA program who are also futime I/S professionals with an average of at leastyears of I/S work experience. The average age of tgroup is 29. The second group of 54 participants wdrawn from the first year students of an undergraducomputer science program. These students haveaverage age of 20 and no work experience.

We administered the soft skills instrument to thparticipants in a large computer laboratory. The twgroups participated on a voluntary basis and at differtimes. Participants interacted one-on-one with tinstrument on separate workstations. Participants wasked to generate response scripts in response to wscenarios displayed on the screen. To avoid any oreffects or systematic differences in the responpatterns as a result of the order in which the scenawas presented, each participant received a differorder of scenarios from his or her software. The ord

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of scenarios presented was determined through the of a random selection algorithm embedded in tsoftware.

After all data were collected, a researcher coded open-ended response scripts from each participant a closed set of response themes for each scenarioensure inter-rater reliability, another research assistindependently classified the open-ended responscripts into response themes. The overall CoheKappa between the researcher and the reseaassistant was at .890.

To rate the quality of the responses from theparticipants, a panel of five senior I/S managers andCIOs rated the response themes to each work situatioon a 7-point scale ranging from (1) very poor responsto (7) an excellent response.

4. RESULTS OF THE VALIDATIONSTUDY

Based on the ratings provided by the panel of expewe graded the responses from the 81 participants. find that experienced I/S professionals scored higherthe overall soft skills assessment (Hotelling's T, F1.625; p = .05). Subsequent univariate analysindicated that experienced I/S professionals performbetter on dimensions of managing permanesubordinates (F = 8.073; p < .01); managing users (5.372; p < .05); managing clients (F = 3.325; p < .0and managing vendors (F = 3.171; p < .05).

Experienced I/S professionals also scored marginahigher on dimensions of managing careers (F = 2.6p < .10); managing task (F = 2.173; p < .10); anmanaging contract subordinates (F = 1.808; p < .1On the dimensions of managing self, superior, apeers, there was no difference in the quality of tresponse strategies between the two groups.

5. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

The differences in the quality of response strategbetween the experienced I/S professionals ainexperienced undergraduates are intriguing. Thedifferences suggest that exposure to work situationsextremely important in developing soft skills or selmanagement and self-regulation strategies.

Compared to the computer science undergraduaexperienced I/S professionals performed significanbetter in managing subordinates, users, clients a

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vendors. They were also better at managing careersprojects, and work tasks. Situations of managsubordinates, users, clients, vendors, and careerstypically not found in any classroom settinConsequently, computer science undergraduates no work experience would not have the opportunityform good response scripts to cope with thesituations. In contrast, computer science undergradufared as well as experienced I/S professionals dimensions of managing self, superior, and peers. attribute this finding to the fact that in formal scholearning environments, undergraduates would hfaced situations that require them to manage themse(e.g., avoiding procrastination), superiors (i.e., thprofessors), and peers (i.e., fellow studenAccordingly, they would have learned to develop agenerate response scripts to cope with these situatio

There are three research and practical implications flow from this study relating to training andevelopment of soft skills; selection of I/professionals; and development of organizatmemory. Results of this study show that whconceptualized as self-management and self-regulastrategies, soft skills can be measured systematicWith the use of the soft skills instrument, organizatiocan detect varying levels of soft skills and surfastrengths and weaknesses on specific dimensions ofskills for their I/S professionals. Once weaknesses identified, an I/S professional can undergo training specific dimension(s) of soft skills. For example, (s)may be exposed to a specific sets of scenarios, taappropriate response strategies to those scenariosrole play such strategies before facing real situationthe work place.

In addition to soft skills training and development, tsoft skills instrument can also be used to improve selection of new I/S professionals. Currentorganizations often select I/S professionals basedtheir hard skills or technical competence. As soft skbecome imperative for high performing I/professionals, it is necessary to select I/S professiobased on their self-management and self-regulacompetence as well. Organizations can gauge the lof soft skills inherent in the candidate by elicitinresponse strategies from potential candidates problematic work situations and scenarios found in soft skills instrument. Such probing is analogous to use of structured interviews (Motowildo, CarteDunnette, Tippins, Werner, Burnett & Vaughan, 1992).In structured interviews, work related incidents aused in the selection interview to predict the behavof applicants in future situations that may occur in organization.

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While the previous two implications focus ondeveloping soft skills at the level of the individual, wbelieve the knowledge base approach also offersunique opportunity for organizations to develop corporate organizational memory of soft skillmanagement. In essence, the organizational memora collection of knowledge about problems anresolutions held by individuals, embedded witprocesses or even expounded by organizational val(Walsh and Ungson, 1991). As such, the collection typical as well as critical work related incidents that afaced by I/S professionals within the organization atheir corresponding appropriate strategic responbecomes a valued body of knowledge for thorganization. The collection of incidents and theresponses can be regarded as a library of best pracendorsed by senior I/S management. These bpractices then reflect the valued behaviors aresponses when dealing with the various stakeholdwithin the organization and can be used as an excelsocialization and training tool for new I/S professionajoining the organization.

To the best of our knowledge, this study presents first attempt to conceptualize and measure soft skillsthe I/S profession. The study significantly adds to texisting body of literature on skill sets for I/Sprofessionals by suggesting a framework by which sskills can be better understood and categorized anddeveloping an instrument that can measure soft skiOur methodology and approach to develop and validan assessment instrument for soft skills may be useto researchers studying the measurement of other kiof I/S skills. As part of our research program in soskills development and measurement, we intend extend the research by further validating our instrumewith other I/S professionals in various organizationincluding both I/S vendor and user organizations. valid instrument to assess soft skills can also be usefuture studies that determine the relative importancesoft skills in I/S work performance.

6. REFERENCES

Boddy, D. and Buchanan, D. (1992) Take the Lead:Interpersonal Skill for Project Managers, Prentice-Hall, London.

1 Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 and Microsoft Windows 95 areTrademarks of the Microsoft Corporation, Inc.

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Earl, M.J. (1995) The Changing Shape and Skills of thI/S Function, Centre for Research in InformatioManagement, Working Paper CRIM WP95/3, LondoBusiness School.

Lee, D.M.S, Trauth, E.M. and Farwell, D. (1995Critical Skills and Knowledge Requirements of I/Professionals: A Joint Academic/Industry InvestigatioMIS Quarterly, Vol. 19 No. 3, September, pp. 313-34

McCall, M.W, Lombardo, M.M. and Morrison, A.M.(1989) The Lessons of Experience: How SuccessExecutives Develop on the Job, Lexington Books, NewYork.

Motowidlo, S.J., Carter, G.W, Dunnette, M.DTippins, N., Werner, S., Burnett, J.R. and VaughaM.J. (1992) Studies of the Structured BehavioInterview, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 77 No.5, pp. 571-587.

Sternberg, R.J., O’Hara, L.A. and Lubart, T.I. (199Creativity as Investment, California ManagementReview, Vol. 40 No. 1, Fall, pp. 8-21.

Taggart, W.M. and Silbey, V. (1979) A “BalancedOrientation for the Information Systems Manager, MISQuarterly, Vol. 3 No. 2, June, pp. 21-33.

Todd, P.A., McKeen, J.D. and Gallupe, R.B. (199The Evolution of I/S Job Skills: A Content Analysis oI/S Job Advertisements from 1970 to 1990, MISQuarterly, Vol. 19 No. 1, March, pp. 1-27.

Wagner, R.K. and Sternberg, R.J. (1985) PractiIntelligence in Real-World Pursuits: The Role of TacKnowledge, Journal of Personality and SociaPsychology, Vol. 49 No. 2, pp. 436-458.

Wagner, R.K. and Sternberg, R.J. (1990) Street Smarts,Measure of Leadership, K.E. Clark and M.B. Clarkeds, pp. 493-504, Leadership Library of America, N.J

Walsh, J.R. and Ungson, G.R (1991) OrganizatioMemory, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 49No. 1, pp. 57-91.

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Soft Skills and Creativity in IS Professionals · Soft Skills and Creativity in IS Professionals ... activities required to elicit user requirements. ... Soft Skills and Creativity