Introduction and the Concept of HRD

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Lecture 1

• Introduction and the Concept of HRD

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Lecture Outline

• Introduction
• Overview of the subject
• The growing importance of HRD
• Definition of HRD
• The Relationship between HRD and HRM
• The Four stages of HRD
• The management of knowledge capital
• The new management theories

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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 1950s and 1960s.

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The growing interest in HRD cont.

• Rising international competition has been fuelled
  by the ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s of the
  South East Asian nations and the burgeoning
  economic power of Japan and South Korea.
• The Japanese economic miracle (Dore 1973 Clark
  1979 Ouchi 1981 Whitely 1992 Dore 1989
  Crawford 1998 Keys, Denton and Miller 1994
  Price 1997Whittaker 1990).

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Growing importance of HRD - leading theorists

• 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).

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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).
• 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).

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• 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).
• If organisations are to be effective - management
  have to become more like employees and employees
  more like management (Lawler).
• 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 peoples aspirations (Senge).

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What is HRD?

• 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).

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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.

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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.
• See figure 3.1 in Sofo (1999).
• In Australia HRM, IR and HRD have increasingly
  overlapped in their concern for productivity and
  international competitive advantage.
• Training Guarantee Administration Act 1990.
• Workplace Relations Act 1996.

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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
• The anorexic syndrome
• Focus on the dollar

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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.

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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.

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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.
• Explicit and tacit knowledge is complementary.
• Build a model that explains the four processes
  used to generate knowledge.

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Creation of knowledge

• Externalisation (tacit to explicit)
• Combination (explicit to explicit)
• Internalisation (explicit to tacit)
• Socialisation (tacit to tacit)

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The New management theories

• Complexity Theory (Stacey 1990).
• Equilibrium does not guarantee success - firm
  viable only if external environment is stable.
• Bounded instability - a state where the
  organisation is partly in equilibrium and partly
  not in equilibrium.
• Organisation two separate but complementary
  systems - the legitimate system and shadow
  system.
• Legitimate system - operationalism - PLOC model
• Shadow system - long term orientated. Future
  threats and opportunities explored.