RESOURCE MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES REQUIRED BY SMALL AND MEDIUM SCALE ENTREPRENEURS IN ENUGU STATE, NIGERIA
Abstract
The study was carried out to determine human and material resource management competencies required by small and medium scale entrepreneurs for economic success in Enugu State. Six research questions were addressed while six null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design and was carried out in Enugu State. The population for the study consisted of 262 respondents which are made up of 173 registered small and medium scale entrepreneurs and 89 Business education lecturers drawn from higher institutions running Business Education programme in the State. Due to the manageable size of the population, the entire population was surveyed; therefore, there was no sampling. The instrument for data collection was a structured 90-item questionnaire titled: Resources Management Competencies Questionnaire (RMCQ). The questionnaire is made up of seven sections. The instrument was validated by three experts. These involved two lecturers from Business education unit of the Department of Vocational Teacher Education, and one lecturer from the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Development Research (CEDR) all from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. To determine the reliability of the instrument, the instrument was administered to 10 small and medium scale entrepreneurs and 10 Business education lecturers in Anambra State. Cronbach Alpha reliability method was used to obtain coefficients of 0.82 for financial resource management, 0.87 for business inventory, 0.75 for human resource, 0.78 for information management, 0.80 for time management and 0.79 for equipment and facilities management competencies while an overall reliability coefficient of 0.83 rwas obtained for the entire research instrument. Data for the study were collected with the help of three research assistants and analyzed using mean for answering the six research question and t-test statistics for hypotheses 1 and 2 while analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test hypotheses 3, 4, 5 and 6 (p<0.05). The results on the data analysis revealed that small and medium scale entrepreneurs in Enugu State required all the 90 identified resource management competencies for economic success. Based on the findings and conclusions drawn from the study, it was recommended among others that: governments should help package the identified resource management competencies into teachable programmes for training graduates and retraining entrepreneurs for economic success in Nigerian economy.