ROLE OF COMPETENCIES IN HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Contemporary organizations are essentially people driven. Termed as human resources in HR parlance, the contribution of people towards success is established. Organizational environment is characterized by competition and performance, thus making traditional human resource practices in managing people redundant. Creating new forms of competitive advantage has thus become a major area of concern for organizations. It gets all the more complex in the contemporary knowledge based industry with the knowledge workers contributing to the organization in the form of human capital. The search for newer forms of competitive advantage in organizations are being seen in the name of competencies at the individual level. Competencies are a combination of observable and applied knowledge, skills and behaviors that create a competitive advantage for an organization. It focuses on how an employee creates value and what is actually accomplished (Nath & Raheja in, 2004). From a managerial point of view, very little has so far been achieved with regard to the question of which competencies create success in the organizations. The same is true in the scholarly research arena thus making the subject an exciting field of enquiry. This paper empirically investigates the role of competencies for employee development in the Indian IT and Pharma Industry. The importance of competencies in the talent acquisition, talent development and talent retention was also examined. The data was collected from a randomly selected sample of 89 employees in the IT and Pharmaceutical industry. The Awareness level of employees, usage of competencies in the different functions along with their perceptions has been collected through a specifically designed questionnaire. Data was content analyzed in a descriptive way with simple statistical treatment of frequency and percentages using the SPSS package. The results show the importance of competencies for organizational success. It also underscores the need for developing / implementing competency based approach for effective human resource management.