Management performance for rural development: Packaged training or capacity building

Abstract

Abstract Development project training has two objectives: a direct objective to improve organizational performance and an indirect objective to enhance an organization's ability to function effectively within a changing environment. Traditional training approaches that emphasize knowledge transfer fail to meet these objectives because they are place‐oriented and thus emphasize giving standardized training to groups of unrelated trainees at a particular facility; they emphasize teaching the skills trainers know rather than determining management needs or building upon knowledge trainees already possess; learning is expected to occur by inference from artificial examples rather than by attacking real problems; trainees are generally drawn from only one management level at a time; actual performance and skills are not examined; and training is treated as a discrete event rather than as just one ripple in a constant stream of management development activity. To overcome these six weaknesses, an alternative approach is advocated. That approach has two major chaacteristics: it is action oriented and it has an organizational capacity development bias rather than a transfer of knowledge to individuals bias. The action orientation and enhancement orientation are described in detail, the approach is illustrated by a Jamaican example, and implications of adopting an action‐based approach are specified. The authors contend this alternative approach is practical, necessary, and rewarding to those who engage in it.