Managerial Resourcefulness: Measuring a Critical Component of Leadership Effectiveness

Kanungo and Misra (1992) distinguished 'skills' from managerial 'competencies', the latter being the basic components of a manager's resourcefulness. Resourcefulness is critical in performing leadership roles that require coping with non-routine, unprogrammable and ill-structured tasks. This paper attempts to clarify the nature of the resourcefulness construct by operationalising it in terms of three basic competencies: affective, intellectual and action-oriented. An empirical study involving 485 managers revealed the underlying structure of resourcefulness as closely paralleling the three competencies. In addition, a fourth overarching dimension of goal-directed problem orientation emerged from the analysis. The study yielded a psychometrically sound measure of managerial resourcefulness with convergent, discriminant and criteria-related concurrent validity. The measure can be used as a diagnostic tool for recruitment and training purposes.