1. Background and Purpose
In order to manage human resources strategically and effectively for community action groups, the division of labor among members is one of the most important issues, so it is necessary to understand the roles involved.4) Previously, we developed a prototype method to analyze the roles of constituents for group functionality, that is, the role structure.4) In that study,5) we categorized members of eight community action groups into three types according to their roles: (1) Leader, (2) Supporter, and (3) Follower.5) In this study, we improved the prototype of the analysis method of role structure and used it to visualize the role structure of eight groups to verify its usefulness and to clarify the role structure common to all community action groups. The purpose of this study is to build a generalizable role structure model of community action groups.
2. Survey Methods
A survey of 106 members belonging to eight community action groups (Table 2) was conducted using a questionnaire modified from a prototype developed in a previous study, in which the role of each member was objectively ascertained. There were 12 survey items for each role (Table 1).
3. Result and Conclusion
In order to visualize the role structure of the members of each community action group, a correspondence analysis was conducted using the results of the survey on the roles of the members of each group, and a scatter diagram was constructed to show the role structure of each group (Figs. 2–9). As a result, it was possible to evaluate the role structure of all groups on two axes, “Leadership–Support” and “Action–Thinking.” which showed the usefulness of the analysis method. Furthermore, a comparison with the results of previous studies4) confirmed the improvement of the cumulative contribution of the two axes, and thus the improvement of the analysis method.
In addition, when evaluated on the “Leadership–Support” axis, the roles were ranked (1) Leader, (2) Supporter, and (3) Follower in order of “Leadership.” This is one of the characteristics of the role structure of community action groups. When evaluated on the “Action–Thinking” axis, each type of role was seen to complement the others, and this world vary, depending on the characteristics of the members of each group. Based on the above results, a model of the role structure of community action groups was developed (Fig. 12).
Understanding role structures with this model will be helpful in appropriately managing human resources by identifying the characteristics of each member.
