Competency Management as a Tool of Talent Management: A Study in Indian IT Organizations

Abstract

Business success revolves round competent people. The competency concept has gained popularity in practice and theory , as evidenced in the amount of the literature on the concept (Boyatzis, 1982; Hamel and Prahalad, 1994; Bartran, 2005). Empirical research has, however, lagged behind resulting in a gap between theory and practice (Lievens, 2004). This study is an attempt in this direction and seeks to examine competency management as a tool of talent management in Indian organizations with focus on the IT sector. IT organizations that have been in business for more than 5 years and having employee strength of 50 and above were considered for the study; these organizations were assumed to have established practice of competency management. Primary data was collected through specifically designed questionnaires. Four cities in the IT sector in the Indian context – Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune-- were selected from the NASSCOM database. 33 organizations were randomly selected from registered organizations using the MATLAB software. 20 employees and HR managers from each of the organizations provided the sample for the study. A majority of the employees at the middle level were aware of competencies; employees in the senior level management have knowledge of their applications. Recruitment followed by HR planning and performance appraisal were perceived to be the important competency based HR functions. Although the study is exploratory in nature, it has contributed in arriving at a conceptual framework to guide the empirical investigations by incorporating the major constructs in the literature.