Introduction
The choice of village manager as a new rural management can be considered a turning point in the history of rural management. From the beginning, the village management have been using cooperation, people's participation, and government grants to resolve the public needs, improve and clean the environment, maintaining and exploiting infrastructure, local green space, health, education and culture to do their activities. The implementation of Guidance Plans (Hadi Plans), public service program and socioeconomic services program constitute three major activities of the village management. The evaluation of periodic performance and awareness of its strengths and weaknesses by the rural community is an essential step towards optimizing the future of rural activities that can measure the extent of rural development by village’s managers in different fields of economic, socio-cultural, physical and other dimensions in order to resolve the deficiencies and problems of this institution. The present study aimed to optimizing the performance of the rural administration with emphasizing on competence from the viewpoint of rural communities. Therefore, in order to do this, we categorize the performance of rural administration in the form of competency indicators to answer the question of what is the competency of rural administration in each of indices considered. And what are the statuses and rank of each of the rural administrations?
Materials and Methods
According to the last administrative-political divisions Izeh city has three sections (Central, Dehdaz and Susan) and 10 villages and two urban centers named Izeh and Dehdaz. According to the Population and Housing Census of 2016, the population is 203594, of which 122,013 are residents of urban areas and 81581 people are living in rural areas. The present research is applied in terms of its purpose and the descriptive-analytical nature. The statistical population of study is 31 villages with more than 5 years of establishment in the central part of Izeh city with a population of 17624 and 3438 households. The sample size was estimated at 380 people based on the Cochran formula. The dispersion of samples' numbers in the villages was distributed according to their populations and the selection of samples in rural areas has been systematically random. The survey method was a questionnaire. In order to analyze the determination of the competency of the rural administration, four indicators (economic, physical, environmental, socio-cultural, and administrative-professional) were used in the form of 47 items based on the studies of other researchers. The questionnaire was designed with closed ended questions in the form of the five-choice Likert scale. The formal validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by a panel of expert professors. The reliability of the questionnaire was 0.84 based on Cronbach's alpha. SPSS and Lisrel software were used to analyze the data in inferential statistics. In this research, confirmatory factor analysis technique was used as a multivariate analysis technique for the analysis of social security factors on tourism development. T-statistic was used to show the significance of each model parameter. The T statistic is obtained from the ratio of the coefficient of each parameter to the error of the standard deviation of that parameter whose absolute value must be greater than 1.96 in order to make these estimates statistically significant. Friedman test was used for ranking the Rural Administration competency.
Discussion and Results
The outputs calculated from the Liserl based on these four dimensions show that the performance of the rural administrations according to the responsive villagers in the physical-environmental dimension is most desirable, with an average factor load of 0.74. The second most important component of rural administration performance was the 0.67 factor socio-cultural factor, which justice, equality and social communication have had the greatest impact on the competence of rural administrations. Also, in all considered parameters, the absolute value of estimated T, which is used to represent the meaningfulness of the parameters of this model, is greater than 1.96 (the minimum amount that is allowed) indicating that the values obtained from Statistically significant. The results of the Friedman test showed that economic performance with an average of 7.02, socio-cultural performance with an average of 9.39, physical activity with an average of 9.29, and the administrative and professional performance with an average of 8.04 were estimated. So the socio-cultural competence has the highest average. The significance level of all the considered items is equal to 0.30, indicating that results can be trusted at 1% error level.
Conclusions
The analysis of the perspective of 380 villagers who responded to the questionnaires distributed based on the second-order confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the villagers rated the rural administrations' performance positively. Most of the physical-environmental competence has been that the villagers have been able to supply villages with adequate drinking water, improve the flow of traffic, optimize resource utilization and control the rural community and manage it in crisis which caused a relative improvement in physical and environmental conditions in studied villages. The positive attitude of the villagers regarding the socio-cultural competencies indicates that the rural administrations have performed well in the field of justice, participation and social mobility, holding ceremonies and celebrations, improving the empowerment of the villagers and their self-sufficiency. The financial problems in the field of creating employment, controlling and managing costs, providing income for the improvement of entrepreneurship and providing the market for the sale of goods and services for agriculture and the development of superior services at the village are the factors that has affected the performance of rural administrations in the economic dimension. Finally, in order to improve the competency and improve the performance of the rural administrations, such solutions like participation in the meetings and congresses related to the village's managements and the use of their findings in expanding the development of the villages, cooperation with the county for promoting the culture and construction of the village, the encouraging villagers for developing handicrafts and marketing of agricultural products, creating employment grounds and helping to provide jobs for job seekers, were presented.