Agricultural Extension Workers Competence, Human Resources Strategy And Performance Study

Since the foundation of new China, extension organization has experienced several revolutions, each of which has pushed new development. But it gets great struck by the tide of economic reform after it enters into 1990s, even gets into the dilemma of 'fault line, broken net and scattered people'. With the gradual openness of agricultural product market and the rise of economy of society, the importance and necessity of developing agriculture industry have become increasingly prominent, and breastfeeding agriculture, strengthening agriculture and upgrading the technological level of agriculture have become increasingly urgent. However, there are seldom empirical studies at home and abroad to study the human resource management of extension staff in extension organization, unable to provide reference for government decision-making. Now the reform has been carried out, what kinds of competencies should extension staff have and what kinds of human resource practice could play a role? This is the purpose of this study.Using the approach of competence construction, I explore the competence of extension staff. Based on the literature review and inspired by the latest research, we adopt interview, task analysis and questionnaire survey to construct competence model. Besides, we validate the competencies from different sources of informants. Finally, one model consisting of six dimensions is gotten, namely, information gathering, market orientation, incremental innovation, job dedication, systematic thinking and teaching ability. Then, we analyze and validate the model by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The analysis results confirm our construct.Though variance analysis, we explore the differences of extension staff competence within different backgrounds. Results find some noteworthy phenomenons, for example, incremental innovation competence of technician in town is lower than technicians' in countryside, and technicians with degree of undergraduate or above have an inferior competence of job dedication, compared to technician with degree of high school or below. These issues deserve great attention in practice. And though correlation analysis and regression analyses, we find some meaningful conclusions toward the relations of competence and performance.In order to explore what kind of human resource practices influence the effectiveness of extension staff competence, we measure the perceived human resource practice from extension staff and probe its moderate effect in the relation of the competence and performance. The results show jod design, performance appraisal and training focus displays moderate effect in the relation of competence and agriculture extension task performance. Finally, all the findings in this study are discussed and the shortcomings and future research directions are pointed out.