Application of the Fuzzy Delphi Method to Identify Middle Leaders' Competencies in Crisis Management
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37134/mrj.vol12.1.3.2023Keywords:
Fuzzy Delphi Method, Competency, Crisis Management, Middle LeadersAbstract
In today's VUCA world, a crisis can strike at any time. An organization must always be ready to face a crisis by ensuring that the organization has not only equipment or procedures for managing a crisis but also employees who are efficient in handling a crisis to prevent the failure of the organization. In order to disseminate knowledge, it is important to expand research on crisis leadership competencies. Keeping this in mind, the goal of this study is to identify the most important leadership competencies during a crisis. Using the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM), this study aims to obtain expert agreement on the construct of humanistic competency for middle leaders in Malaysia's Ministry of Education (MOE). An instrument containing constructs and a list of elements waweres presented to a total of 15 experts from related fields. According to the findings of this study, the expert panel agreed with the presented constructs and elements of crisis management competencies for middle leaders in MOE. All the 10 elements tested have also met the conditions set in FDM, which are above 0.2 for the threshold value (d≤0.2), obtained expert agreement above 75% with values ranging from an 87% to 100% agreement, and passed the alpha cut value above 0.5 (α-cut ≥0.5) with values ranging from 0.918 to 0.960. The defuzzification process used by FDM also rearranges all the elements according to priority based on expert consensus. Among all the elements agreed upon by experts, it has been found that two elements occupy the highest rank in the construct of humanity and are considered the most crucial skills for a contemporary leader in managing crises: communication skills and the ability to prioritize team harmony. In conclusion, this study successfully presents new constructs and elements for crisis management competency in the context of educational organizations and middle leaders. The findings from this study will provide benefits for the theoretical evolution, and policy development for organizational education, and also in terms of practice, especially for middle leaders in educational organizations. For organizations, these findings can serve as a reference for providing training to cultivate exceptional leaders. As for the mid-level leaders themselves, these findings can serve as guidelines for assessing their leadership effectiveness. Furthermore, regarding the limitations of this study, it focused solely on the Ministry of Education in Malaysia. Therefore, in order to broaden the literature in this field, the researcher encourages future scholars to expand the scope of research by involving other educational organizations.
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