Human Resources Professional Competencies

Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 Human Resources Professional Competencies Usanee Saengchot1*, Damrong Wattana2, Mongkolchai Wiriyapinit3 , Suchai Thanawastien4 1 Technopreneurship and Innovation Management Program, Graduate School, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand 2 Public Administration Department, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand 3 Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand 4 Ph.D. Program in Information Technology, Shinawatra University, Pathum Thani 12160, Thailand Abstract This study aimed at determining the competencies that affect human resource professionalism. It is a qualitative study done by in-depth interview with human resource experts, and thematic analysis based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: MBNQA concept on the 11 Core Values, the Process Classification Framework of the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), year 2014, version 6.1.1. concept, number 1, Develop Vision and Strategy; and number 6, Develop and Manage Human Capital, and The Fifth Discipline concept by Peter M. Senge. The study results found that the competencies that affect human resource professionalism are performance system competency, HR task competency, and learning competency. Human resource experts agreed equally on the 3 competencies, comprising of 94.12 percent. Moreover, human resource professional competencies are important to human resource officers and organizations because competency creates innovations and new knowledge that benefits mankind. Therefore, there should be encouragement, support, and development on competencies of professional human resource officers to become more professional in order to work successfully, effectively, and efficiently. Keywords: Human Resources Professionalism, Competency, MBNQA, APQC, The Fifth Discipline. http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2752 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 Introduction Which competencies affect human resource professionalism? This question has been given interests and has been continuously studied extensively in the academic and human resource field to determine the human resource professionalism competencies for professional human resource officers. Professionalism has long been studied until today. A lot of famous philosophers and executives had proposed on specialized professionalism. Professionals are people with high experiences who can apply their academic knowledge and technology on their work and create effectiveness in order to drive the economy and the organization in a more commercial approach (Fournier, 1999; Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002). Professionalism is an approach with discipline and responsibility (Fournier, 1999). For human resource professionalism, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) had described human resource professionalism in an early level as experts in supporting specialized work with limited experiences, medium level as senior experts who can manage projects, senior level as someone who is highly experienced, and executive level as the highest leader in human resource management Sustainable growth and success of an organization requires a professional human resource officer to join together the administrative section and the organization/s personnel. A human resource officer is responsible for the management of human resources inside the organization. Therefore, the human resource officer requires professionalism to complete his/her work. When an organization assigns a non-professional to do human resource management, it likely results in troubles and bad reputations for the organization. As an example by the Thai Labour Solidarity Committee and 4 union groups, including representatives from the NXP Manufacturing Co., LTD, Linfox Co., LTD, Electrolux (Thailand) Co., LTD, and General Motors (Thailand) which joined together to protest and filed a letter of demand in the case where the employer unfairly changed their employment statuses and terminated their employment resulting the factories to temporarily close while damaging their business, creating bad reputations, delaying production, stopping income the organization’s and employees’ income, creating bad relationships, creating risks for employees of being unemployed because the employer might close the business, moreover, affecting the country’s macroeconomics and security (Manager Online, 2013). Therefore, professional human resource officers must behave in the workplace in a way to create productivity, known as high effective work. The characteristic that produces this behavior is called competency (Boyatzis, 1982). Competencies should be something that can be differentiated between superior and average, meaning that it should be possible to tell who has great or medium performances (McClelland, 1973). Competency is directly related to the organization’s effort to heighten internal knowledge and start innovations by harmonizing knowledge together (Hellstrom, Kemlin, & Malmquist, 2000; Ley & Albert, 2003). As a result, there has been continuous efforts in changing concepts towards competency determination to make business succeed in competitions, leading the competency paradigm into thinking strategically, creating creativeness in workplace and new innovations in the organization (Ulrich, 1997). Competencies were linked to various other responsibilities such as training and development of work efficacy, management, rewards, etc. (Beck, 2003; Lucia & Lepsinger, 1999). We can see that more than 50 percent of organizations in the United Kingdom uses competency mapping in work (Thompson & Strebler, 1995). Moreover, competency management also helps improve the employees’ work efficacy, decreasing http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2753 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 training costs and resign rates (Homer, 2001). Linking competency mapping with human resources is the fundamentals of learning competencies (Lei & Hitt, 1996; Spangenberg, Schroder, & Duvenage, 1999). Investing for the organization’s employees to have creativity and innovation can help driving the organization into a position with higher advantage in the competition and operation, making it an effective management of intellectual assets known as human capital, which is more valuable than physical and financial asset (Seubert, Balaji, & Makhija, 2001). If the competencies for human resource professionalism are determined, the organization will have professionals to work in the human resources while extensively reducing further bad consequences. Determining competencies is the first step of creating a competency model in order to look at work efficacies that are related to the operating capacity of the organization. It is necessary to state the context of the management responsibilities and various responsibilities. Determining competencies is process of finding necessary skills required to work as a model for working successfully (Draganidis & Mentzas, 2006). Determining competencies as standard characteristics such as personal characteristics, motivation, and other competencies allow the organization to differentiate people easier (Boyatzis, 1982). Therefore, the concept of Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: MBNQA about the 11 Core Values, the concept of the Process Classification Framework by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), year 2014, version 6.1.1, number 1, Develop Vision and Strategy; and number 6, Develop and Manage Human Capital, and the concept of The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge were used to determine human resource professionalism competencies in this study. MBNQA was found in 1987 while the United States was creating national rewarding criteria to support good management and to create guidelines to increase competition capacities for the organization and the country, heading towards sustainable advancement in an international scale. The uniqueness of MBNQA is that it can be applied to organizations any size, any type, both private and government sectors, including profiting and non-profiting organizations (The National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2014). The concept of the Process Classification Framework by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), year 2014, version 6.1.1, number 1, Develop Vision and Strategy; and number 6, Develop and Manage Human Capital, cover human resource works, visions and strategies. APQC were established in 1977 while giving services to organizations globally in every economic sector, including the educational and government sectors which were internationally accepted for their operating process and development of work efficacy (The American Productivity and Quality Center, 2014). The concept of The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge focuses on learning. Organizations that follow the Fifth Discipline are able to create learning capacities and use learning better than other organizations. The Fifth Discipline became internationally popular in applying to improve management quality based on philosophy, moral, and ethics in human resources (Senge, 1990). Even though there are many literatures about competencies, however, human resource professional competencies are still incomplete and unclear. Mostly both private and government organizations still cannot determine competencies that affect human resource professionalism in order for human resource officers with higher competencies to drive the organization. Many organizations still cannot determine good enough how should good competencies for human resource professionalism be and what should be included. The http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2754 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 researcher believes that determining competencies for human resource professionalism is required and important for every human resource officer and organization. Therefore, researcher is interested in studying the competencies for human resource professionalism. Research Objectives To determine the competencies that affect human resource professionalism Research Questions 1. Which competencies affect human resource professionalism? 2. Why competencies are important for human resource professionalism and the organization? Methodology To study the competencies for human resource professionalism, the researcher had specified a qualitative study method that includes In-depth Interview human resource experts, and thematic analysis. The content focuses on analyzing competencies for human resource professionalism, using 3 concepts which are the concept of Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: MBNQA about the 11 Core Values, the concept of the Process Classification Framework by American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), year 2014, version 6.1.1, number 1, Develop Vision and Strategy; and number 6, Develop and Manage Human Capital, and the concept of the Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge. The study methods are as follow: 1. In-depth Interview with 17 human resource experts in the positions equal or higher than managers. Human resource experts are people with high skills, knowledge, abilities, expertise, and experiences in human resources. They were given respect from the organization members and in the field of human resources and viewed as human resource experts. The interview questions were open-ended questions, so the human resource experts could clearly give comments according to the truth. This study was conducted only in the areas of private industrial factories in the industrial estate in Chonburi and Rayong provinces. The human resource expert interviews were distributed in various industrial types. The researcher selected this area because these two provinces were continuously supported by the government and private sectors; therefore, there were a large number of labors working in this area. It is also an important economic and industrial area which creates a great amount of income for Thailand. 2. Analyzing and decoding qualitative data using thematic analysis from the human resource expert interviews to decipher the words from the interviews, both direct and indirect. Results and Discussion Competencies that affect human resource professionalism according to human resource expert opinions From the analysis of the opinions on competencies affecting human resource professionalism according to the opinions of human resource experts, it was found that 3 competencies affect professionalism in human resources, which are Performance System Competency, HR Task Competency, and Learning Competency. The 3 competencies were agreed equally by 16 out of 17 human resource experts, calculated as 94.12 percent, with details as follow: Performance System Competency such as Visionary leadership, Organizational learning and agility, Systems perspective, Valuing people, Delivering value and results, http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2755 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 Managing for innovation, Management by fact, Ethics and transparency, Focus on success, Customer-focused excellence, Societal responsibility, due to Performance System Competency is a competency in improving management quality of the organization concretely using a performance system, improving efficacy and increasing competitive capacities of personnel, the organization, and the country, leading to international competition and excellency, improving the operation process in order to produce acceptable results, encouraging communication and information exchange about the operation system. It is a tool for managing personal and organizational operation results, using the ability to clearly and practically lead the organization, learning together with people in the organization using systematic thinking, focusing on seeing the importance of people inside the organization, operating to produce results valuably, adding value using new innovations, and analyzing data properly and truthfully to achieve the objectives of the organization and stakeholders with an operation system that is conducted under morals, ethics, transparency, and social responsibility. HR Task Competency such as Develop vision and strategy; Define the business concept and long-term vision, Develop business strategy, Manage strategic initiatives, and Develop and manage human capital; Develop and manage human resources (HR) planning, policies, and strategies, Recruit, source, and select employees, Develop and counsel employees, Manage employee relations, Reward and retain employees, Redeploy and retire employees, Manage employee information and analytics, Manage employee communication, due to HR Task Competency is a human resources competency that creates development in the operation process, leading to good efficacy, creating ways of thinking and new work methods that are better than just working to achieve the planned objectives. It helps personnel and the organization to adapt to various different situations, making strategies and correct visions on both short-term and long-term strategies, and creating proper strategy management. It also manages and greatly gives importance to human resources, both in the development of human resources, creating laboring strategies in planning on searching and selecting the right man for the organization’s objectives and the position. Importance is given to each and every level of personnel by creating a good labor relation system that everyone participates in showing opinions and giving advice to personnel about how to prevent and solve personal and work-related problems. It creates a rewarding system for personnel that works hard, creates good reputation, and is accepted in both personal and organization levels to continuously keep these people working for the organization. It has steps of working and fairly taking care of retired personnel, creating satisfaction for both the employer and employee. Also, there exists organization personnel information analysis and management while having an effective communicative method to create correct understandings for both the employer and employee. Learning Competency such as Personal mastery, Mental models, Shared vision, Team learning, Systems thinking, and human resource experts give opinion that learning competency should cover about Changes in environments inside and outside the organization, English language and Foreign languages ability, Personal characteristics of human resource officers, due to Learning Competency is a learning competency of the personnel and the organization. It makes learning capacities increase continuously, creates determination, consistent curiosity, and enthusiasm in an attempt to achieve the planned objective. It creates systematic work and optimism. It makes one able to correctly predict things that are going to happen by reflecting the real situation in order to response properly. It makes changes succeed. It creates determination and mutual ideology for personnel to move towards the http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2756 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 same objectives, creating concepts, mutual understandings and relationships, learning and working together as a team in order to use the team’s power, and sharing experiences, knowledge skills, and information about better working methods. It creates systematic thinking in both the overview and specific points of view, making personnel able to follow each step accordingly, relatively, directionally, and objectively which creates better results. The thinking system leads to the links inside the background behind the changes of the working system. Learning to change the environment both inside and outside of the organization enables defense and prepares for immediate change. English and foreign language skills help human resource officers to communicate with and understand people in the society. It also helps in studying important and modern researches in order to improve their skills. Moreover, it also improves character and trait and helps in increasing learning capacity and efficacy of the human resource officer. In can been seen that the 3 mentioned competencies are competencies that affect human resource professionalism according to human resource experts’ opinions, as shown in Table 1. Table 1 – Thematic Analysis of the competencies that affect human resource professionalism Based on Human Resource Experts Opinion Opinions of HR Experts Visionary leadership Code Frequency Percentage Performance 16 94.12 16 94.12 System Competency Organizational learning and agility Systems perspective Valuing people Delivering value and results Managing for innovation Management by fact Ethics and transparency Focus on success Customer-focused excellence Societal responsibility Develop vision and strategy; HR Task Competency Define the business concept and long-term vision Develop business strategy http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2757 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 Manage strategic initiatives Develop and manage human capital; Develop and manage human resources (HR) planning, policies, and strategies Recruit, source, and select employees Develop and counsel employees Manage employee relations Reward and retain employees Redeploy and retire employees Manage employee information and analytics Manage employee communication Personal mastery Learning Competency 16 94.12 Mental models Shared vision Team learning Systems thinking Changes in environments inside and outside the organization English language and Foreign languages ability Personal characteristics of human resource officers From the arguments that ask why competencies are important for human resource professionalism and the organization, it can be seen that the 3 competencies, including Performance System Competency, HR Task Competency, and Learning Competency, are competencies that are important for human resource professionalism and the organization because human competencies create new innovations, inventions, processes, and knowledge that are beneficial for mankind and the world. Therefore, we should encourage, support, and http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2758 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 improve human resource officers in order to have higher competencies for human resource professionalism. This will aid work in succeeding the planned objectives and creates good results. Moreover, it is a method to support and develop the organization and counteracts organizational changes, both in the present and the future. Additionally, human resource professional officers are responsible for taking care of people inside the organization, so it is advisable to improve their competencies to create human resource professionalism and use those competencies as a tool to improve the organization’s personnel and the human resource officers themselves in the highly competitive and changing environment because competencies are strategic tools that cover all the processes. Human resource officers are ones who are responsible for continually taking care of and giving advice to people in the organization so they have continuous improvement, planting and supporting innovation inside the organization to create intellectual property. Therefore human resource officers should realize which levels of skills, knowledge, performances, and competencies do they have. Also, they should know how to apply information technology into their working process in order to improve their competencies for human resource professionalism. The organization needs to compete with itself and create business uniqueness. The increased business demand requires defining competency that can drive the organization to excellency. Human resource officers need to be the center of knowledge. The important strategic tool that allows the organization to counteract the continuous change and link work effective performances in order to compete in the competition is competencies that create effective performance measured by specific action. Conclusions The concept of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: MBNQA about the 11 Core Values, the concept of Process Classification Framework by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), year 2014, version 6.1.1, number 1, Develop Vision and Strategy; and number 6, Develop and Manage Human Capital, and the concept The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge are concepts that create Performance System Competency, HR Task Competency, and Learning Competency are competencies that affect human resource professionalism. Performance System Competency creates improvement and focuses on product and service quality. It stimulates organizations to exchange knowledge and skills to help each other to have better managements. It is the most effective way of management. It can be applied to organizations of all sizes and types, in order to become leaders in the world market. HR Task Competency creates process and improvement in working efficacy. It helps the organization adapt to the environment that is changing rapidly and creates a better way of working in order to succeed in competitions. It creates management, comparisons, and improvements of novel innovations using the Develop Vision and Strategy and Develop and Manage Human Capital concepts. Learning Competency enables learning for personnel and the organization. It creates collaboration and knowledge sharing, promoting innovations and creating results wanted by the personnel and the organization. It is an important basis that allows the organization to survive and strive in the period of rapid change and intense competition. Definitions of competencies for human resource professionalism as stated above were extracted from human resource professionals. They are competencies that affect human resource professionalism in relation to the organization’s needs. It uses international concepts http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2759 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 of competency to apply to human resource professionalism in Thailand in order to step up into the international level while suits Thai contexts. These competencies can also be practically used and maximize benefits for human resource officers and the organization. Moreover, these 3 competencies, which are Performance System Competency, HR Task Competency, and Learning Competency, are all competencies that are important to human resource professionalism and the organization. Nowadays, it is accepted that competencies are an important business tool that helps personal to create professionalism, especially for human resource officers. Moreover, human resource officers should keep studying. They should know how to use their skills, knowledge, and competencies morally and properly, to maximize benefits of their own and the organization. As stated by His Majesty the King to be read aloud in the graduation ceremony of Chulalongkorn University on Saturday, 18 July, 1998. "Knowing self means knowing and accepting yourself what knowledge you have and how well you know it and knowing what kind of work should you do. Knowing self allows people to use their knowledge and skills for the right job and maximize its efficacy. It also makes people always want to learn and increase experiences to improve their own efficacy from high to higher. Knowing the situation means to contemplate about the events that have happened to find their causes, their present situations, and their predicted futures. Knowing the situation allows us to make the right plans and decisions to solve the problem in time and in need. This will allow us to work and produce the efficient benefits. Knowing self and the situation is a way to promote smooth and advancing life and business.” (Academy Sufficiency Center, 1998) Recommendations 1. Human resource professionals should use competencies in human resource professionalism under morals and ethics of the human resource profession or good conducts. Acting under the morals of human resource profession can be used as a guideline in work life and social life. They also have been discussed widely in leaderships, morals, and ethics. There were studies in basic levels of moral teaching in schools because morals affect the society, stability, and faith. 2. There should be Human Resource Professionalism Criteria and Standards and capability evaluation system by Human Resource Professionalism Criteria and Standards as human resource officers would know and do the test to evaluate his/her Human Resource Professionalism in order to improve his/ her own capability accordingly. http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2760 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 References Academy Sufficiency Center. (1998). Stated by His Majesty the King to be read aloud in the graduation ceremony of Chulalongkorn University. from http://www.sufficiencyeconomy.org [in Thai] Beck, S. (2003). “Skill and competence management as a base of an integrated personnel development (IPD) – a pilot project in the Putzmeister, Inc./Germany”. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 9(12), 1381-1387. Boyatzis, R. E. (1982). The competent manager. 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(2014). Process Classification Framework version 6.1.1. . from https://www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/documents/apqc-processclassification-framework-pcf-cross-industry-pdf-version-611 The National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2014). 2015-2016 Baldrige Excellence Framework and Criteria (Business/Nonprofit). from http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/2015-2016_baldrige_framework_criteria.cfm http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2761 Volume 2 March Issue 4 2016 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 Thompson, M., & Strebler, M. T. (1995). The Use of Competences in the UK: Institute for Employment Studies Report, Brighton. Ulrich, D. (1997). Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value to HR Practices: Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 2762