Competency Mapping is a process to identify key competencies for an

organization and/or a job and incorporating those competencies throughout

the various processes (i.e. job evaluation, training, recruitment) of the
organization. A competency is defined as a behavior (i.e. communication,
leadership) rather than a skill or ability.
DEFINITION:
According to Boyatzis(1982) A capacity that exists in a person that leads to
behaviour that meets the job demands within parameters of organizational
environment, and that, in turn brings about desired results
The steps involved in competency mapping are presented below:
1. Conduct a job analysis by asking incumbents to complete a position
information questionnaire(PIQ). This can be provided for incumbents to
complete, or used as a basis for conducting one-on-one interviews
using the PIQ as a guide. The primary goal is to gather from incumbents
what they feel are the key behaviors necessary to perform their
respective jobs.
2. Using the results of the job analysis, a competency based job
description is developed. It is developed after carefully analyzing the
input from the represented group of incumbents and converting it to
standard competencies.
3. With a competency based job description, mapping the competencies
can be done. The competencies of the respective job description
become factors for assessment on the performance evaluation. Using
competencies will help to perform more objective evaluations based on
displayed or not displayed behaviors.
4. Taking the competency mapping one step further, one can use the
results of ones evaluation to identify in what competencies individuals
need additional development or training. This will help in focusing on
training needs required to achieve the goals of the position and
company and help the employees develop toward the ultimate success
of the organization.
METHODS OF COMPETENCY MAPPING

It is not easy to identify all the competencies required to fulfill the job
requirements. However, a number of methods and approaches have been
developed and successfully tried out. These methods have helped managers to a large extent, to identify
and reinforce and/or develop these competencies both for the growth of the individual and the growth of
the organization. In the following section, some major approaches of competency mapping have been
presented.

1) Assessment Centre
Assessment Centre is a mechanism to identify the potential for growth. It is a
procedure (not location) that uses a variety of techniques to evaluate
employees for manpower purpose and decisions. It was initiated by American
Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1960 for line personnel being con
Step 1:Gathering facts: The methodology usually employed through an open-ended questionnaire,
gathering retrospective data. The events should have happened fairly recently: the longer the time period
between the events and their gathering, the greater the danger that the users may reply with imagined
stereotypical responses. Interviews can also be used, but these must be handled with extreme care not to
bias the user. sidered for promotion to supervisory positions. An essential feature

of the assessment center is the use of situational test to observe specific job
behavior. Since it is with reference to a job, elements related to the job are
simulated through a variety of tests. The assessors observe the behavior and
make independent evaluation of what they have observed, which results in
identifying strengths and weaknesses of the attributes being studied.
It is, however, worth remembering that there is a large body of academic
research which suggests that the assessment centre is probably one of the
most valid predictors of performance in a job and, if correctly structured, is
probably one of the fairest and most objective means of gathering information
upon which a selection decision can be based. From the candidates
perspective it is important to be natural and to be oneself when faced with an
assessment centre, remembering always that you can only be assessed on
what you have done and what the assessors can observe. The International
Personnel Management Association (IPMA) has identified the following
elements, essential for a process to be considered as assessment center:
a) A job analysis of relevant behavior to determine attributes skills, etc. for
effective job performance and what should be evaluated by assessment
center.
Techniques used must be validated to assess the dimensions of skills
and abilities.

 Multiple assessment techniques must be used.

Assessment techniques must include job related simulations.
Multiple assessors must be used for each assessed.
Assessors must be thoroughly trained.
Behavioral observations by assessors must be classified into some
meaningful and relevant categories of attributes, skills and abilities, etc.
Systematic procedures should be used to record observations.
Assessors must prepare a report.
All information thus generated must be integrated either by discussion
or application of statistical techniques.
Data thus generated can become extremely useful in identifying employees
with potential for growth. Following are some of the benefits of the
assessment center:
It helps in identifying early the supervisory/ managerial potential and
gives sufficient lead time for training before the person occupies the new
position.
It helps in identifying the training and development needs.
Assessors who are generally senior managers in the organization find
the training for assessor as a relevant experience to know their
organization a little better.
The assessment center exercise provides an opportunity for the
organization to review its HRM policies.
Assessment Centre is a complex process and requires investment in time. It
should safeguard itself from misunderstandings and deviations in its
implementation. For this, the following concerns should be ensured:
Assessment Centre for diagnosis is often converted as Assessment
Centre for prediction of long range potential.

 The assessors judgment may reflect the perception of reality and not
the reality itself.
One is not sure if the benefits outweigh the cost.
Assessment Centre comprises a number of exercises or simulations which
have been designed to replicate the tasks and demands of the job. These
exercises or simulations will have been designed in such a way that
candidates can undertake them both singly and together and they will be
observed by assessors while they are doing the exercises. The main types of
exercises are presented below. Most organizations use a combination of them
to assess the strengths, weaknesses and potential of employees.
a) Group Discussions: In these, candidates are brought together as a
committee or project team with one or a number of items to make a
recommendation on. Candidates may be assigned specific roles to play in the
group or it may be structured in such a way that all the candidates have the
same basic information. Group discussion allows them to exchange
information and ideas and gives them the experience of working in a team. In
the work place, discussions enable management to draw on the ideas and
expertise of staff, and to acknowledge the staff as valued members of a team.
Some advantages of group discussion are:
Ideas can be generated.
Ideas can be shared.
Ideas can be tried out.
Ideas can be responded to by others.
When the dynamics are right, groups provide a supportive and
nurturing environment for academic and professional endeavour.
Group discussion skills have many professional applications.
Working in groups is fun!
A useful strategy for developing an effective group discussion is to identify
task and maintenance roles that members can take up. Following roles, and

the dialogue that might accompany them in a group discussion have been
identified.
Positive Task Roles: These roles help in reaching the goals more effectively:
Initiator: Recommends novel ideas about the problem at hand, new
ways to approach the problem, or possible solutions not yet
considered.
Information seeker: Emphasises getting the facts by calling for
background information from others.
Information giver: Provides data for forming decisions, including facts
that derive from expertise.
Opinion seeker: Asks for more qualitative types of data, such as
attitudes, values, and feelings.
Opinion giver: Provides opinions, values, and feelings.
Clarifier: Gives additional information- examples, rephrasing,
applications about points being made by others.
Summariser: Provides a secretarial function.
Positive Maintenance Roles : These become particularly important as the
discussion develops and opposing points of view begin to emerge:
Social Supporter: Rewards others through agreement, warmth , and
praise.
Harmonizer: Mediates conflicts among group members.
Tension Reliever: Informally points out the positive and negative
aspects of the groups dynamics and calls for change, if necessary.
Energiser: Stimulates the group to continue working when the
discussion flags.
Compromiser: Shifts her/his own position on an issue in order to
reduce conflict in the group.

 Gatekeeper: Smoothes communication by setting up procedures and

ensuring equal participation from members.
b) In Tray: This type of exercise is normally undertaken by candidates
individually. The materials comprise a bundle of correspondence and the
candidate is placed in the role of somebody, generally, which assumed a new
position or replaced their predecessor at short notice and has been asked to
deal with their accumulated correspondence. Generally the only evidence that
the assessors have to work with is the annotations which the candidates have
made on the articles of mail. It is important when undertaking such an
exercise to make sure that the items are not just dealt with, but are clearly
marked on the items any thoughts that candidates have about them or any
other actions that they would wish to undertake.
c) Interview Simulations/Role Plays: In these exercises candidates meet
individually with a role player or resource person. Their brief is either to gather
information to form a view and make a decision, or alternatively, to engage in
discussion with the resource person to come to a resolution on an aspect or
issue of dispute. Typically, candidates will be allowed 15 -30 minutes to
prepare for such a meeting and will be given a short, general brief on the
objective of the meeting. Although the assessment is made mainly on the
conduct of the meeting itself, consideration are also be given to preparatory
notes.
d) Case Studies / Analysis Exercises: In this type of exercise the candidate
is presented with the task of making a decision about a particular business
case. They are provided with a large amount of factual information which is
generally ambiguous and, in some cases, contradictory. Candidates generally
work independently on such an exercise and their recommendation or
decision is usually to be communicated in the form of a brief written report
and/or a presentation made to the assessors. As with the other exercises it is
important with this kind of exercise to ensure that their thought processes are
clearly articulated and available for the scrutiny of the assessors. Of
paramount importance, if the brief requires a decision to be made, ensure that
a decision is made and articulated.
2) Critical Incidents Technique
It is difficult to define critical incident except to say that it can contribute to the
growth and decay of a system. Perhaps one way to understand the concept

would be to examine what it does. Despite numerous variations in procedures

for gathering and analyzing critical incidents researchers and practitioners
agree the critical incidents technique can be described as a set of procedures
for systematically identifying behaviours that contribute to success or failure of
individuals or organisations in specific situations. First of all, a list of good and
bad on the job behaviour is prepared for each job. A few judges are asked to
rate how good and how bad is good and bad behaviour, respectively. Based
on these ratings a check-list of good and bad behavior is prepared.
The next task is to train supervisors in taking notes on critical incidents or
outstanding examples of success or failure of the subordinates in meeting the
job requirements. The incidents are immediately noted down by the supervisor
as he observes them. Very often, the employee concerned is also involved in
discussions with his supervisor before the incidents are recorded, particularly
when an unfavourable incident is being recorded, thus facilitating the
employee to come out with his side of the story.
The objective of immediately recording the critical incidents is to improve the
supervisors ability as an observer and also to reduce the common tendency
to rely on recall and hence attendant distortions in the incidents. Thus, a
balance-sheet for each employee is generated which can be used at the end
of the year to see how well the employee has performed. Besides being
objective a definite advantage of this technique is that it identifies areas where
counseling may be useful.
In real world of task performance, users are perhaps in the best position to
recognize critical incidents caused by usability problems and design flaws in
the user interface. Critical incident identification is arguably the single most
important kind of information associated with task performance in usability
-oriented context. Following are the criteria for a successful use of critical
incident technique:
Data are centred around real critical incidents that occur during a
taskperformance.
Tasks are performed by real users.
Users are located in their normal working environment.
Data are captured in normal task situations, not contrived laboratory
settings.

 Users self report their own critical incidents after they have happened.
No direct interaction takes place between user and evaluator during the
description of the incident(s).
Quality data can be captured at low cost to the user.
Critical Incidents Technique is useful for obtaining in-depth data about a
particular role or set of tasks. It is extremely useful to obtain detailed feedback
on a design option. It involves the following three steps:
There are two kinds of approaches to gather information:
1) Unstructured approach: where the individual is asked to write down two
good things and two bad things that happened when one was carrying out an
activity.
2) Moderate structured approach: where the individual is asked to respond
to following questions relating to what happened when he/she was carrying
out an activity.
What lead up to the situation?
What was done that was especially effective or non- effective?
What was the result( outcome)?
Step 2: Content analysis: Second step consists of identifying the contents or
themes represented by the clusters of incidents and conducting retranslation
exercises during which the analyst or other respondents sort the incidents into
content dimensions or categories. These steps help to identify incidents that
are judged to represent dimensions of the behaviour being considered. This
can be done using a simple spreadsheet. Every item is entered as a separate
incident to start with, and then each of the incidents is compiled into
categories. Category membership is marked as identical , quite similar and
could be similar. This continues until each item is assigned to a category on at
least a quite similar basis.Each category is then given a name and the
number of the responses in the category are counted. These are in turn
converted into percentages (of total number of responses) and a report is
formulated.

Step 3: Creating feedback: It is important to consider that both positive and

negative feedback be provided. The poor features should be arranged in order
of frequency, using the number of responses per category. Same should be
done with the good features. At this point it is necessary to go back to the
software and examine the circumstances that led up to each category of
critical incident. Identify what aspect of the interface was responsible for the
incident. Sometimes one finds that there is not one, but several aspects of an
interaction that lead to a critical incident; it is their conjunction together that
makes it critical and it would be an error to focus on one salient aspect.
Some of the advantages of critical incident technique are presented
below:
Some of the human errors that are unconsciously committed can be
traced and rectified by these methods. For example, a case study on
pilots obtained detailed factual information about pilot error
experiences in reading and interpreting aircraft instruments from
people not trained in the critical incident technique (i.e., eyewitness or
the pilot who made the error)
Users with no background in software engineering or human
computer interaction, and with the barest minimum of training in
critical incident identification, can identify, report, and rate the severity
level of their own critical incidents. This result is important because
successful use of the reported critical incident method depends on the
ability of typical users to recognise and report critical incidents
effectively.
Some of the disadvantages of critical incidents method are presented
below:
It focuses on critical incidents therefore routine incidents will not be
reported. It is therefore poor as a tool for routine task analysis.
Respondents may still reply with stereotypes, not actual events. Using
more structure in the form improves this but not always.
Success of the user reported critical incident method depends on the
ability of typical end users to recognise and report critical incidents

effectively, but there is no reason to believe that all users have this
ability naturally.
3) Interview Techniques Competency Mapping
Almost every organisation uses an interview in some shape or form, as part of
competency mapping. Enormous amounts of research have been conducted
into interviews and numerous books have been written on the subject. There
are, however, a few general guidelines, the observation of which should aid
the use of an interview for competency mapping.
The interview consists of interaction between interviewer and applicant. If
handled properly, it can be a powerful technique in achieving accurate
information and getting access to material otherwise unavailable. If the
interview is not handled carefully, it can be a source of bias, restricting or
distorting the flow of communication.
Since the interview is one of the most commonly used personal contact
methods, great care has to be taken before, during and after the interview.
Following steps are suggested:
Before the actual interviews begins, the critical areas in which questions
will be asked must be identified for judging ability and skills. It is
advisable to write down these critical areas, define them with examples,
and form a scale to rate responses. If there is more than one
interviewer, some practice and mock interviews will help calibrate
variations in individual interviewers ratings.
The second step is to scrutinize the information provided to identify
skills, incidents and experiences in the career of the candidate, which
may answer questions raised around the critical areas. This procedure
will make interviews less removed from reality and the applicant will be
more comfortable because the discussion will focus on his experiences.
An interview is a face-to-face situation. The applicant is on guard and
careful to present the best face possible. At the same time he is tense,
nervous and possibly frightened. Therefore, during the interview, tact
and sensitivity can be very useful. The interviewer can get a better
response if he creates a sense of ease and informality and hence

uncover clues to the interviewees motivation, attitudes, feelings,

temperament, etc., which are otherwise difficult to comprehend.
The fundamental step is establishing rapport, putting the interviewee
at ease; conveying the impression that the interview is a conversation
between two friends, and not a confrontation of employer and
employee. One way to achieve this is by initially asking questions not
directly related to the job, that is, chatting casually about the weather,
journey and so on.
Once the interviewee is put at ease the interviewer starts asking
questions, or seeking information related to the job. Here again it is
extremely important to lead up to complex questions gradually. Asking a
difficult, complex question in the beginning can affect subsequent
interaction, particularly if the interviewee is not able to answer the
question. Thus it is advisable for the pattern to follow the simple-tocomplex sequence.
Showing surprise or disapproval of speech, clothes, or answers to
questions can also inhibit the candidate. The interviewee is oversensitive to such reactions. Hence, an effort to try and understand the
interviewees point of view and orientation can go a long way in getting
to know the applicant.
Leading questions should be avoided because they give the impression
that the interviewer is seeking certain kinds of answers. This may create
a conflict in the interviewee, if he has strong views on the subject. Nor
should the interviewer allow the interview to get out of hand. He should
be alert and check the interviewee if he tries to lead the discussion in
areas where he feels extremely competent, if it is likely to stray from
relevant areas.
The interviewer should be prepared with precise questions, and not take
too much time in framing them.
Once this phase is over, the interviewers should discuss the interviewee,
identify areas of agreement and disagreement, and make a tentative decision
about the candidate. It will be helpful if, in addition to rating the applicant,
interviewers made short notes on their impression of candidates behavior
responses; which can then be discussed later. If the interview is to continue
for many days, an evaluation of the days work, content of questions and

general pattern of response should be made for possible mid-course

correction.
4) Questionnaires
Questionnaires are written lists of questions that users fill out questionnaire
and return. You begin by formulating questions about your product based on
the type of information you want to know. The questionnaire sources below
provide more information on designing effective questions. This technique can
be used at any stage of development, depending on the questions that are
asked in the questionnaire. Often, questionnaires are used after products are
shipped to assess customer satisfaction with the product. Such questionnaires
often identify usability issues that should have been caught in-house before
the product was released to the market.
a) Common Metric Questionnaire (CMQ): They examine some of the
competencies to work performance and have five sections: Background,
Contacts with People, Decision Making, Physical and Mechanical Activities,
and Work Setting. The background section asks 41 general questions about
work requirements such as travel, seasonality, and license requirements. The
Contacts with People section asks 62 questions targeting level of supervision,
degree of internal and external contacts, and meeting requirements. The 80
Decision Making items in the CMQ focus on relevant occupational knowledge
and skill, language and sensory requirements, and managerial and business
decision making. The Physical and Mechanical Activities section contains 53
items about physical activities and equipment, machinery, and tools. Work
Setting contains 47 items that focus on environmental conditions and other job
characteristics. The CMQ is a relatively new instrument.
b) Functional Job Analysis: The most recent version of Functional Job
Analysis uses seven scales to describe what workers do in jobs. These are:
Things, Data, People, Worker Instructions, Reasoning, Maths, and Language.
Each scale has several levels that are anchored with specific behavioral
statements and illustrative tasks and are used to collect job information.
c) Multipurpose Occupational System Analysis Inventory (MOSAIC): In
this method each job analysis inventory collects data from the office of
personnel management system through a variety of descriptors. Two major
descriptors in each questionnaire are tasks and competencies. Tasks are

rated on importance and competencies are rated on several scales including

importance and requirements for performing the task. This is mostly used for
US government jobs.
d) Occupational Analysis Inventory: It contains 617 work elements.
designed to yield more specific job information while still capturing work
requirements for virtually all occupations. The major categories of items are
five-fold: Information Received, Mental Activities, Work Behavior, Work Goals,
and Work Context. Respondents rate each job element on one of four rating
scales: part-of-job, extent, applicability, or a special scale designed for the
element. Afterwards , the matching is done between competencies and work
requirements.
e) Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ): It is a structured job analysis
instrument to measure job characteristics and relate them to human
characteristics. It consists of 195 job elements that represent in a
comprehensive manner the domain of human behavior involved in work
activities. These items fall into following five categories:
Information input (where and how the worker gets information),
Mental processes (reasoning and other processes that workers use),
Work output (physical activities and tools used on the job),
Relationships with other persons, and
Job context (the physical and social contexts of work).
f) Work Profiling System (WPS): It is designed to help employers
accomplish human resource functions. The competency approach is designed
to yield reports targeted toward various human resource functions such as
individual development planning, employee selection, and job description.
There are three versions of the WPS tied to types of occupations: managerial,
service, and technical occupations. It contains a structured questionaire which
measures ability and personality attributes.
5) Psychometric Tests
Many organizations use some form of psychometric assessment as a part of
their selection process. For some people this is a prospect about which there

is a natural and understandable wariness of the unknown.

A psychometric test is a standardized objective measure of a sample of
behavior. It is standardized because the procedure of administering the test,
the environment in which the test is taken, and the method of calculating
individual scores are uniformly applied. It is objective because a good test
measures the individual differences in an unbiased scientific method without
the interference of human factors. Most of these tests are time bound and
have a correct answer. A persons score is calculated on the basis of correct
answers. Most tests could be classified in two broad categories:
a) Aptitude Tests: They refer to the potentiality that a person has to profit
from training. It predicts how well a person would be able to perform after
training and not what he has done in the past. They are developed to identify
individuals with special inclinations in given abilities. Hence they cover more
concrete, clearly defined or practical abilities like mechanical aptitude, clinical
aptitude and artistic aptitude etc.
b) Achievement Tests: These tests measure the level of proficiency that a
person has been able to achieve. They measure what a person has done.
Most of these testsmeasure such things as language usage, arithmetic
computation and reasoning etc.
The Role of HRM in Knowledge Management
Knowledge management has become a fashionable term in organizations today. We
can define knowledge management as the discipline that promotes an integrated
approach to identifying, capturing, retrieving, sharing, and evaluating an enterprises
information assets. These information assets may include databases, documents,
policies, and procedures as well as uncaptured, tacit expertise and experience resident
in individual workers.
You can download A Set of Eight Ultimate HR Tools for HR Managers HERE.
HR and Knowledge Management
There are several roles that can be played by HR in developing knowledge
management system. First, HR should help the organization articulate the purpose of
the knowledge management system. Investing in a knowledge management initiative
without a clear sense of purpose is like investing in an expensive camera that has far
more capabilities than you need to take good pictures of family and friends. Too
often, organizations embrace technologies to solve problems before they've even
identified the problems they are trying to solve. Then, once they realize the error, they

find it difficult to abandon the original solution and difficult to gather the resources
needed to invest in a solution to the real problem. Effectively framing the knowledge
management issue, before deciding on a course of action, is a crucial prerequisite for
success.
Second, as a knowledge facilitator, HRM must ensure alignment among an
organization's mission, statement of ethics, and policies: These should all be directed
toward creating an environment of sharing and using knowledge with full
understanding of the competitive consequences. Furthermore, HRM must nourish a
culture that embraces getting the right information to the right people at the right
time.
Third, HRM should also create the "ultimate employee experience." That is, by
transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge through education,
organizations must build employee skills, competencies, and careers, creating "bench
strength." This combines the traditional training and development responsibilities of
HRM with the new responsibilities of human capital steward: using all of the
organization's resources to create strategic capability. Disney's new staff orientation,
which emphasizes the firm's mission, values, and history within a context of the
"magic kingdom" experience, is an example of this process of making tacit
knowledge more visible.
You can download A Set of Eight Ultimate HR Tools for HR Managers HERE.
Fourth, HRM must integrate effective knowledge sharing and usage into daily life.
That is, knowledge sharing must be expected, recognized, and rewarded. For many
individuals and organizations, this reverses the conventional relationship between
knowledge and power. Often, the common pattern was to hoard knowledge because it
made the individual more valuable and more difficult to replace. Effective knowledge
management requires this trend to be overturned and requires those with information
to become teachers and mentors who ensure that others in the firm know what they
know. Teaching must become part of everyone's job. Clearly, for such a cultural shift
to take place, HRM must overhaul selection, appraisal, and compensation practices.
Human resource management has the capabilities for creating, measuring, and
reinforcing a knowledge-sharing expectation.
Fifth, HRM must relax controls and allow (even encourage) behaviors that, in the
clockwork world of industrial efficiency, never would have been tolerated. For
example, conversations at the water cooler were viewed in the past as unproductive
uses of employee timeafter all, employees were not at their desks completing
specified tasks detailed in their job descriptions. In the knowledge economy,

conversations inside and outside the company are the chief mechanism for making
change and renewal an ongoing part of the company's culture.
As another example, consider individuals in organizations described as "gossips,"
who would rather talk than work. Frederick Taylor's industrial engineers would have
eliminated these gossips from workplaces in the early twentieth century, since they
did nothing that was perceptibly valuable. However, in the knowledge economy, if the
conversations are relevant to the firm's strategic intent, these same people may be
described as "knowledge brokers": those individuals who like to move around the
company to hear what is going on, sparking new knowledge creation by carrying
ideas between groups of people who do not communicate directly. If the topics serve
organizational needs, these individuals play a role similar to bees that cross-pollinate
flowers and sustain a larger ecosystem.
Organizations should selectively recognize and reward, rather than universally
discourage and punish, these types of behaviors. Clearly, not all conversation is
productive and constructive. Human resource management still must play a role in
discouraging gossip that undermines, rather than promotes, a learning community.
Human resource management will need to adjust both its own perspective (from ruleenforcer) as well as that of managers and others who hold outdated notions of what is
"real work."
Sixth, HRM must take a strategic approach to helping firms manage email, instant
messenger, internet surfing, and similar uses of technology. Clearly, the Internet has a
role in generating and disseminating knowledge, and therefore is an integral part of
knowledge management. But what are the unintended effects of monitoring email,
tracking employees' web searches, and similar issues related to privacy? Certainly
some control is needed, but the larger question for HRM is determining appropriate
boundaries. When does control become counterproductive? When does excessive
monitoring become an inappropriate invasion of privacy?
A related issue is HRM's role in helping firms manage the distancing consequences of
electronic communication. As employees increasingly rely on technology to
communicate, they lose opportunities to develop the rich, multifaceted relationships
that encourage the communication of tacit knowledge. Human resource management
can contribute to developing social capital by sensitizing employees to the negative
consequences of excessive reliance on electronic media and by creating opportunities
for face-to-face contact.
Seventh, HRM must champion the low-tech solutions to knowledge management.
Although it should not ignore the high-tech knowledge management tools, HRM

contains the expertise to develop low-tech knowledge management strategies. For

example, when the team that developed the Dustbuster vacuum tool was created, they
were given a "war room" in which they could spread out their materials and leave
sketches, models, notes, and so on plastered on walls and throughout the workspace.
These visible outputs of their thinking processes helped create a shared context for
their efforts and turned the room into a truly collaborative workspace.
Some Asian firms, such as Dai-Ichi, create special rooms (with green tea and
comfortable places to sit), where researchers are expected to spend a half-hour daily,
telling whomever they meet about their current work. Neither of the two preceding
examples requires large financial investments in technology that will rapidly become
obsolete. Yet both examples demonstrate how HRM could help a firm orchestrate and
facilitate knowledge sharing.
You can download excellent powerpoint slides on HR Management and Human
Capital Strategy HERE.
As can be seen from the previous discussion, the knowledge facilitator role cannot be
easily slotted into traditional HRM functions, such as training and development or
compensation. The knowledge facilitator role is much more broad and requires
creative integration across traditional HRM activities. It entails both rethinking old
ways of managing the workplace as well as using innovative approaches outside the
box of traditional HRM. Most important, becoming an effective knowledge facilitator
requires conceptualizing HRM as a vehicle for creating capabilities and capitalizing
on the human factor to create a community of knowledge workers.
Source:
Mark Lengnick-Hall and Cynthia A Lengnick-Hall , Human Resource Management
in the Knowledge Economy: New Challenges, New Roles, New Capabilities, BerrettKoehler Publishers. You can obtain this excellent book here