Peer Helping, Learning by Doing and Performance Evaluation: The Empirical Analysis of Taiwan’s Agricultural Extension Department
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Ding, Chung-Wei
Abstract
In the theory of industrial organization, labor quality is one of the important factors affecting workers’ performance. As the quality of workers is closely related to their education levels and work experiences, past literature emphasizes mostly on impacts of human capital accumulated through education and learning-by-doing on individual performance. In recent years, peer interaction among team members in the workplace has become the major focus of empirical industrial studies. This study attempts to combine these two directions of research to examine their impacts on individual and team performances of agricultural extension personnels .
The industrial structure of Taiwan farmers’ association is quite unique. Farmers’ association is non-profit in nature, therefore, the management idea is different from general profit-seeking organizations. Over the past decades, Taiwan’s farmers’ association has been facing major challenges of agricultural transition and trade liberalization, performance evaluation of the entire organization as well as individual workers has important policy implications. However, most past research focused on the credit department and typically ignored the extension department. Agricultural extension services play a key role in the implementation of rural development policies, and extension personnels are regarded as the helmsman of agriculture, this study therefore is intended to present an in-depth study of the performance of the extension department in the farmers’ association.
To examine the group performance of the extension department, Probit model is used to analyze factors affecting the winning probability of Golden Extension Award. As for individual performance, this study not only followed the standard fixed effect model to examine impact of peer effect on sale growth rates of the production and marketing group, we also built a three-dimension probability model to analyze the association of peer interaction and individual performance.
The empirical results of this study showed that both active and passive peer interaction significantly improve group performance. As for individual performance, passive peer interaction was shown to be a key factor, however, its impact depends on whether or not there were peers with similar expertise. If a professional peer does exist in the group, individual performance is more likely to be improved. On the contrary, in the absence of professional peers, peer interaction might have a negative impact on individual performance due to the crowding-out effect of worktime. This study also found that within the agricultural extension team, the effect of mutual assistance among extension personnels does exist, implying that the individual work effort not only will improve individual performance, it will also create a significant positive influence on his/her peers. In addition, the present study found that individual performance could be improved through accumulation of work experiences, the phenomenon of learning-by-doing of the agricultural extension personnels, therefore, is verified.
In conclusion, the empirical study of this study demonstrated that peer interaction is one key factor to the overall performance of the agricultural extension department. When the extension team maintains a harmonious interaction with mutual exchanges of work experiences and expertise, a win-win atmosphere could be created, and thus will eventually improve on both individual and group performances.
Subjects
Golden Extension Award
Outstanding Agricultural Production and Marketing Groups Award
agricultural extension personnel
helping effect
peer effect
SDGs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-100-R98627017-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):47163c3ccc4a973526dae5f94368bf1a