Topic One Introduction and the concept of HRD
In this course we examine HRD in three parts:
– Foundations of HRD
• Introduction to the evolution of HRD, Influences on employee behavior, Learning and HRD.
– Framework of HRD
• Assessing, Designing, Implementing, Evaluating.
– HRD Applications
• Coaching and performance management, employee counseling, career management, management development, organizational development.
• Other applications that may be considered include onboarding, skills and technical training and diversity training.
Emerging trends that impact HRD
• Competition:
-‐ New technologies, better educated and trained employees, hiring knowledge workers to meet new challenges, develop globally competent leaders and managers (cultural sensitivity, better communication skills)
• Skills gap:
-‐ Hiring educated workers, awareness of skills deficiencies e.g. basic reading writing, math and analytical skills.
• Workforce diversity:
-‐ Aging workforce, racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, women in the work force and re-‐entering the work force and career opportunities.
• Need for lifelong learning – learning beyond your degree e.g. developing financial and accounting skills, leadership skills (emotional intelligence), coaching and mentoring skills,
-‐ Organizations must think about using different instructional technologies e.g. intranet, internet, interactive programs, providing teleconferencing facilities.
• Facilitating the learning organization:
-‐ Organizations must be able to learn, adapt and change to become a learning organization,
-‐ HRD professionals need to facilitate learning principles and tactics, how learning relates to performance, the relationship between learning and fundamental change
• Ethics / governance:
-‐ How business education programs can promote understanding of business ethics and ethical behavior -‐ should be linked to performance management, career development, selection criteria.
The growing interest in HRD:
• HRD as manifest of the intensification of both domestic and international competition faced by many western nations.
• Traditional managerial tools were clearly no longer delivering the competitive ‘fruits’
as was previously the case during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
• Widespread interest in HRD comes at a time when global competition and
organisational change have stimulated a need for employees who can take initiative, embrace risk, stimulate innovation and cope with uncertainty (Spreitzer 1997).
• Learning will become increasingly important because of the usual reasons of competitiveness -‐information technology makes what we do more transparent (Agyris 1998).
Comments from leading theorists:
• We have become handmaidens of management. Too many of us operate in unconscious collusion, within the assumption that power resides only at the top.
Organisations should resemble organisms rather than mechanisms (Bellman). So what does this mean?
-‐ Organisms respond to their environment by changing, developing and adapting.
• Learning and performing will be one of the same thing. The entrepreneurial spirit will be intensified. Everything you say about learning will be about performance.
The hard part will be to connect training and learning (Block).
• Training signifies one-‐way transfer of established wisdom or skill from the trainer to the unformed trainee. Learning reverses this -‐ learning involves not only absorbing existing information, but also creating new solutions to not-‐yet-‐fully-‐understood problems (Moss-‐Kanter).
-‐ Moss-‐Kanter highlights the difference between training and learning.
-‐ Training is a one way transfer of skill and knowledge
-‐ Learning is a two way transfer – absorbing the the information and knowledge and learning the skill but also creating new solutions / ideas.
Learning is an evolving and continuous process.
• If organisations are to be effective -‐ management have to become more like employees and employees more like management (Lawler).
-‐ Management need to understand the need for learning, development, and creative output (E.g. Google)
-‐ Employees need to take charge, ownership and responsibility of their learning and development – not wait for the organization to act.
• I have yet to experience any organisation that comes close to exhibiting the
capacities of a learning organisation -‐ the ability of everyone to continually challenge prevailing thinking, see the big picture and balance short and long-‐term
consequences and the ability to create shared visions and capture people’s aspirations (Senge).
-‐ The learning organization – challenges prevailing thinking, sees the bigger picture, considers short and long term consequences, creates a shared vision, and captures employee aspirations.
What is HRD Human Resource Development?
• The notion of HRD originated in the USA and is a much broader concept than training, development or education.
• Beyond the reach of traditional training.
• The American Society for Training and Development defines HRD:
– The process of increasing the capacity of the human resource through development. It is thus a process of adding value to individuals, teams or an organisation as a human system (McLagan 1989).
The concept of HRD:
• Nadler and Nadler (1989) suggests that HRD includes training, education and development.
• McLagan (1989) defines HRD as the integrated use of training and development, organisational development and career development to improve individual, group and organisational effectiveness.
• Giley and Eggland (1989) defined HRD as organised learning experiences provided by employers within a specified time to bring about the possibility of performance or personal growth.
• Watkins (1989) HRD fostering long-‐term, work-‐related learning capacity at individual, group and organisational level.
The Relationship between HRM, IR and HRD:
• People focus is central.
• People development is a vital concept to HRM and IR.
• HRM and IR must view training and development as an investment.
• In Australia HRM, IR and HRD have increasingly overlapped in their concern for productivity and international competitive advantage.
HRD Values:
• Individual level
– Meaning in work – enabling meaningful work – Learning-‐ providing individual learning experiences – Performance-‐ improving individual job performance
• Organisational level
– Meaning in work – building socially responsible organisations – Learning-‐ building learning systems
– Performance-‐improving organisational performance
Top value rankings across HRD professionals, Bates and Chen 2005
– Improving individual job performance 42%
– Improving organisational performance 30%
– Providing individual learning experiences 6%
– Building learning systems 12%
– Enabling meaningful work 4%
– Building socially responsible organisations 6%
The failure of management re-‐engineering
• Management re-‐engineering -‐ outsourcing, downsizing, creating flatter structures and cost cutting.
• Based on the principal of transferring costs to an external system -‐ customers and suppliers.
• Costs rebounding the organisation:
– loss of knowledge
– Ignoring traditional, but critical process and standards.
– Forgetting that loyalty is a two way street – Everything is saved mentality
– Focus on the dollar
The management of knowledge capital:
• Knowledge of an organisation is a remarkable and critical resource.
• Knowledge is a unique resource
• There is no law of diminishing returns -‐ knowledge is not intrinsically scarce.
• Knowledge grows from sharing -‐ externalisation.
• There is a difference between knowledge and information
• Organisations have to be able to maintain their current knowledge, disseminate specific knowledge to parts of the organisation, create new knowledge and unlearn useless knowledge.
The Four stages of HRD:
• An investigation stage -‐ where needs are investigated and identified.
• A design stage -‐ where aims and objectives and content are examined.
• An implementation stage -‐ where formal and informal learning takes place.
• An evaluation stage -‐ where the worth of the learning experience is judged.
Two new theoretical concepts:
• HRD is crucially informed by two concepts -‐ creation of knowledge and new management theories.
• Creation of knowledge (Nonaka 1991).
• Explicit knowledge -‐ knowledge the individual can declare.
• Tacit knowledge -‐ knowledge in the mind of the individual but the individual is unaware of it or cannot declare it.
-‐ Tacit knowledge example: Knowing to use manners when making a request, social skills – know how to approach someone
-‐ Gained through: extensive personal contact and regular interaction with a person or job
-‐ Maybe revealed through practice e.g., perfecting a recipe.
• Explicit and tacit knowledge are complementary.
• Build a model that explains the four processes used to generate knowledge.
Creation of Knowledge:
• Externalisation (tacit to explicit)
• Combination (explicit to explicit)
• Internalisation (explicit to tacit)
• Socialisation (tacit to tacit)
The New Management theories:
• Organisation two separate but complementary systems -‐ the legitimate system and shadow system.
• Legitimate system -‐ operationalism -‐ PLOC model (POLC – formally plan , lead, organize and control.)
• Shadow system -‐ long term orientated. Future threats and opportunities explored.
HRD and employee Behaviour:
Relevant reading Chapter 2
• The main goal of HRD is to assist individuals and organizations to achieve their goals
• Understanding behavior is critical for HRD programs and interventions to be successful
• Some of the major factors that influence behavior may be both external and internal forces
• External forces – found in the Business environment and outside of the individual’s control
Ø Outside the organization (economic conditions, technological changes, labor market conditions, laws and regulations, labor unions)
Ø Work environment inside the organization (leadership, coworkers and outcomes of performance)
• Internal forces – those within the control of the individual employee Ø Motivation (needs based, cognitive process, non-‐cognitive)
Ø Attitudes (demonstrate how thoughts can influence behavior and represent a person’s general feeling-‐ positive or negative towards a stimulus object) Ø Knowledge, Skills and Abilities (KSAs)