Chapter 7 Recruiting, Selecting, Training, and Developing Employees Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, the student should be able to: 1. Describe the recruiting process, including internal and external recruiting and the importance of realistic job previews. 2. Discuss the steps in the selection process and the basic selection criteria used by most organizations. 3. Identify and discuss popular selection techniques that organizations use to hire new employees. 4. Describe the selection decision, including potential selection errors and reliability and validity. 5. Discuss how organizations train and develop new employees to better enable them to perform effectively. Chapter Outline Opening Case: The Coaching Carousel It’s called the coaching carousel. Every year when football season ends, coaches get fired and new coaches get hired. And because every team needs a head coach, there is precisely one job at each team and that job has to be filled—quickly. Consider the National Football League. The day after the regular season ends is known as Black Monday, and most firings take place that day or a few days after. Of course, not all teams failing to make the playoffs fire their coach. At the end of the 2013 season, seven head coaches were fired. Some new head coaches had come from a pool of former head coaches who were previously fired but are still considered viable prospects. The same situation exists at the college level, but given the larger number of teams involved things are even more complicated. Most of all, the teams want someone who can win. Team success is measured by wins and losses, and a coach who consistently fails to win will not be employed very long. Some hiring decisions are applauded by the fans and media, while others attract doubt and scrutiny. Introduction This chapter examines the processes used by organizations to attract, hire, and develop new employees. I. Recruiting Employees The processes of recruitment and selection are the means whereby organizations acquire new human resources. Recruiting is the process of developing a pool of qualified applicants who are interested in working for the organization and from which the organization might reasonably select the best individual or individuals to hire for employment. However, and as illustrated in Figure 7.1, recruiting is a two-way street; that is, just as the organization is looking for qualified job applicants, those applicants are also likely to be looking at various potential employment opportunities. Both parties in the recruiting process—the organization and the prospective employee—have goals they are trying to accomplish in the recruiting process. The most basic and fundamental goal of an organization’s recruiting effort is essentially to fulfill the definition of recruiting: to develop a pool of qualified applicants. This overriding goal, however, also suggests three specific related goals that are important to the recruiting process. The organization wants to optimize the size of the pool of qualified applicants; that is, have enough candidates to be able to have choices but not so many that processing would become overwhelming. The recruiting process should generate a pool of applicants that is both qualified and interested in working for the organization. The process should give prospective applicants an honest and candid assessment of the kinds of jobs and opportunities that the organization can potentially make available to them. In many cases, a prospective employee’s goals are relatively straightforward. Individuals work for several reasons, but the most common are: Financial income Job security Opportunity for promotion Benefits Challenging work assignments In addition to these goals, however, individuals can also have idiosyncratic goals. One fundamental decision that an organization must make as part of its recruiting strategy is whether to focus recruiting efforts internally or externally. As summarized in Table 7.1 both internal recruiting and external recruiting have unique advantages and disadvantages. A. Internal Recruiting Internal recruiting is the process of looking inside the organization for existing qualified employees who might be promoted to higher-level positions. In any event, it is generally important that an organization use internal recruiting as part of its overall planning process because, as noted in Table 7.1, internal recruiting has several advantages over external recruiting. Perhaps the most important of these advantages is employees can see that there is really an opportunity for advancement when a firm relies on internal recruiting. This is likely to serve as a major source of motivation for those employees who perform their jobs as best as they can. Employees recruited internally also bring the advantage of familiarity with the company—its heritage, culture, policies and procedures, strategies, and ways of doing business, making transitions to new positions easier. Yet, as shown in Table 7.1, there are also disadvantages when internal recruiting is the only type a firm uses. This can result in stagnation and stifle creativity. It is unlikely that new ideas will be proposed for how to deal with challenges if everyone in the firm has only been familiar with one way of doing things. Finally, internal recruiting creates a ripple effect in the organization. Every time a person is promoted a new opening must be filled, and a relatively few promotions can sometimes result in a large-scale set of transfers and movements from position to position within the organization. The two most common methods used for internal recruiting are job posting and supervisory recommendations. Job Posting Perhaps the most common method that organizations use for internal recruiting is a process called job posting. This is a relatively simple procedure. Vacancies in the organization are publicized through various media such as the company’s newsletters, bulletin boards, and/or internal memos. Some organizations that rely heavily on internal recruiting go so far as to require that jobs be posted internally before any external recruiting is undertaken. Note that a candidate hired through a job posting could be applying for a promotion or merely for a lateral transfer. Supervisory Recommendations Another method of internal recruiting is supervisory recommendations. In this case, when a new position needs to be filled, a manager solicits nominations or recommendations for the position from supervisors in the organization. It is important, however, that supervisors give equal consideration to all potential candidates in these cases. Given the large numbers of layoffs and workforce reductions (from downsizing) in recent years, some potential applicants are somewhere between the classifications of internal and external candidates. Individuals who have been laid-off (as opposed to terminated) are usually considered first when openings occur in the organization. B. External Recruiting External recruiting involves looking to sources outside the organization for prospective employees. As noted in Table 7.1, external recruiting has advantages and disadvantages that directly counter to those of internal recruiting. In some cases, no internal employees may be able to fill new positions, thereby making external recruiting the only option. On the other hand, external recruiting may result in motivational problems in the organization. Current employees to feel that they have been denied opportunities and that outsiders who are brought into the organization at higher levels may be less qualified than the current employees themselves. External recruiting also tends to be more expensive than internal recruiting because of the advertising and other search processes that must be undertaken. Many organizations prefer to rely on both internal and external recruiting strategies. This combined approach allows an organization to match the advantages and disadvantages of each particular recruiting effort to its own unique context. C. Methods for External Recruiting Word-of-Mouth Recruiting Referrals come to an organization via word-of-mouth recruiting. In most cases, the organization simply informs current employees that positions are available and encourages them to refer friends, family members, or neighbors for those jobs. From the organization’s perspective, this method is an inexpensive way to generate a large number of applicants. In addition, if one assumes that the current employees are satisfactory and that people generally associate with people who are similar to them, then the organization should have a reasonable chance of generating high-quality applicants with this method. Advertisements Advertisements on Web sites and in newspapers and related publications are also popular methods for external recruiting. Some professional periodicals and publications also have space set aside for help-wanted recruiting ads. This form of advertising tends to be relatively expensive and, perhaps surprisingly, attracts somewhat fewer qualified applicants than do some other recruiting methods. It does enable the organization to cast a wide net, however, in its efforts to publicize its affirmative action programs to reach every sector of the labor market. Employment Agencies Public employment agencies became a formal part of the recruiting process with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935. This law requires that anyone who is paid unemployment compensation must register the fact with local a state employment office. These state agencies work closely with the U.S. Employment Service to get unemployed individuals off state aid as quickly as possible and back in permanent jobs. Employers register their job openings with the local state employment agency, and the agency collects data from unemployed persons and uses this data to match qualified individuals with available jobs. Private employment agencies are more likely to serve the white-collar labor market, and they charge a fee for their services. Sometimes this fee is paid by the individual; sometimes it is paid by the organization if it hires an individual referred to it. Because private employment agencies are supported by the firms and individuals that use their services, however, they may be able to devote more resources to performing their function. Finally, executive search firms specialize in applicants for high-level positions. An individual working for an executive search firm is also known as a headhunter. Typically, the search firm screens potential candidates and then presents the organization with a small number of candidates, all of whom are highly qualified and interested. Regardless of the type of employment agency involved, if an organization engages the services of an agency that discriminates, it’s also the case that the organization will be held responsible for the discrimination, so it is important to make sure that any employment agency truly offers equal opportunity to all. College Placement Offices Most large organizations visit college campuses every year to interview graduates for jobs within the organization. An advantage of this method for the organization is that it can specify qualifications such as major, grade point average, work experience, and so forth. It is also relatively inexpensive method of recruiting because colleges and universities typically provide the facilities, schedule the appointments, and so forth. For students, this job search method is also quite efficient. Digital Recruiting The importance of digital recruiting would be hard to overestimate. Perhaps the most important reason for the growing reliance on digital recruiting is that it is cost-effective. It does not cost much to post a job opening on a job board like those available at monster.com and hotjob.com, and these Web sites are visited literally by millions of people annually. In addition, many organizations that start their own Web sites for recruiting find that they can reach potential applicants more easily and use these sites as marketing tools. Not long ago, the effectiveness of digital recruiting was somewhat limited by the number of potential job applicants who had easy access to the Internet, but data now suggests that there are 245 million Internet users in the United States and 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide. Finally, digital recruiting saves time. A potential applicant who sees an interesting opening can e-mail questions and answers as well as electronically submit résumés—all in all a matter of minutes. Of course, there are potential problems associated with digital recruiting as well. Ease of access also means that many people may apply for a job who are not really qualified, and this means more time spent sifting through the résumés of unqualified applicants. Also, although digital recruiting has the potential to generate a more diverse group of applicants, differences in access to computers and the Internet still exist in the United States. D. Internships: A Mixed Model Although it is easier to think about recruiting having either an internal or external focus, it is possible to take an approach that really combines elements of the two. Of course, an internship is a form of temporary employee who can help respond to work demands in short term. The intern is hired, in essence, on approval. In other words, if the organization does not think that the person is someone who will be able to contribute to the organization or that the person is a good fit, then the organization simply allows the internship to end. On the other hand, if the intern interests the organization, it can offer that person permanent employment. E. Realistic Job Previews A final topic for discussion concerning external recruiting is the use of the realistic job preview (RJP). It is an effective technique for ensuring that job seekers understand the actual nature of the jobs available to them. In the past, many recruiters were guilty of painting a glowing picture of what a particular job might entail. They made the job sound glamorous, exciting, fun, challenging, and rewarding in different ways. Once employees accepted the job, however, they found just the opposite: The job they were hired to fill proved to be boring, tedious, monotonous, and routine. Realistic information about the job can be presented using video or film, or it can be presented using brochures and printed materials. An applicant can also get realistic information by observing people at work on the job in question. How RJPs seem to work is interesting. If applicants are given realistic previews before they make a decision, some potential applicants will be discouraged and withdraw from consideration. At the same time, however, those who know what to expect and still choose to join the organization are generally more successful and more likely to remain with the company. A meta-analysis of several studies of realistic job previews reported that they are generally associated with higher performance, higher levels of trust in the organization, and lower turnover. II. The Selection Process Selection is concerned with identifying the best candidate or candidates for a job among the pool of qualified applicants developed during the recruiting process. A. Steps in Selection At a general level, the selection process involves three distinct steps. The first step is gathering information about the members of the pool of qualified recruits regarding the levels of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) possessed by each applicant. The second step is evaluating the qualifications of each applicant from among the recruiting pool. The third step is making the actual decision about which candidate or candidates will be offered employment with the organization. B. Basic Selection Criteria Several possible criteria can be used in the selection decision, and these often differ in terms of how objectively they can be assessed. Education and Experience In a selection context, education refers to the formal classroom training an individual has received in public or private schools and in a college, university, or technical school. For some jobs, the educational fields are open; in other cases, they must be within a specified area such as mechanical engineering, French, or human resource management. Experience refers to the amount of time the individual may have spent working in either a general capacity or a particular field. Experience is presumably an indicator of an individual’s familiarity with work and his or her ability to work and is a surrogate measure of a person’s competencies as an employee. In some cases, it may be necessary that the individual have a predetermined level of experience in a certain field of study. Skills and Abilities The assessment of skills and abilities, on the other hand, is rather mixed in terms of objectivity. It is relatively straightforward to assess someone’s typing ability, and it is even possible to measure an ability such as spatial relations objectively. But, as organizations move toward teamwork and team-based operating systems, many of them are also putting more emphasis on hiring individuals with the skills necessary to function effectively in a group situation. Personal Characteristics Some personal characteristics, which are believed to reflect the applicant’s personality, are also difficult to assess objectively. More recently, however, a great deal of attention has been paid to assessing applicants in terms of the “big five” personality traits. These traits tend to be more behavioral than cognitive or emotional and so can be assessed in a fairly objective manner. Furthermore, recent research has suggested that they are likely to be more important for job performance than more traditional personality traits. Hiring for “Fit” When a firm decides to hire someone on the basis of fit, it hires that person not because he or she is the most qualified for a specific job, but because she or he is a good fit for the larger organization. In some cases, the organization might assume that the requisite KSAs can actually be learned after the person has been hired, resulting in even more reliance on selection based on fit. III. Popular Selection Techniques Indeed, most organizations rely on a comprehensive system of multiple selection techniques to ensure that they gather all the relevant data and assess this data rigorously, objectively, and without discrimination. Figure 7.3 illustrates one example selection sequence that an organization might use. A. Applications and Background Checks An employment application asks individuals for various facts and information pertaining to their personal background. Commonly asked questions include details such as name, educational background, personal career goals, and experience. All information on an employment application must relate to an individual’s ability to perform the job. An employment application cannot ask for a person’s gender, age, or marital status because these questions have no bearing on that person’s ability to perform specific jobs. Such questions could even serve as a basis for an applicant’s claim of discrimination on the basis of age or gender. Figure 7.4 presents an example of an application blank. Application blanks, when used in typical selection systems, provide a quick and inexpensive mechanism for gathering several kinds of objective information about an individual and information of a type that can be easily verified. A number of innovations have extended the usefulness of application blanks, including the following: The so-called weighted application blank relies on statistical techniques to determine the relative importance of various personal factors for predicting a person’s ability to perform a job effectively. The biodata application blanks focuses on the same type of information found in a regular application, but it also goes into more complex and detailed assessments about that background. B. Employment Tests Another popular selection technique used by many organizations is an employment test, or a device for measuring the characteristics of an individual. These characteristics may include personality, intelligence, or aptitude. Although employment tests are generally traditional question-and-answer exercises that applicants complete on paper or online, the courts consider any device used to make an employment decision, including interviews, to be a test. Figure 7.5 shows the type of items typically found on various employment tests. Different types of employment tests are commonly used. These terms often refer to how the test is used rather than the nature of the test. Aptitude tests focus on predicting future performance. Achievement tests focus on the mastery of some set of learned skills. Cognitive ability tests measure mental skills. The applicant is not required to do anything physical, only to demonstrate some type of knowledge. General intelligence, or g, refers to reasoning, or problem-solving skills, but it is typically measured in terms of the information one learns in school. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is a test of general intelligence. Scores on these tests can be expressed in terms of intelligence quotient (IQ). Two important facts make the use of intelligence tests in selection controversial. First, IQ is related to performance on a wide variety of jobs because more intelligent people perform better. The second fact is that, on average, African-Americans tend to score lower on these tests. Therefore, using intelligence tests as selection criteria will likely result in disparate impact. Other cognitive abilities include vocabulary and reading comprehension and mathematics, clerical ability, and spatial relations. Psychomotor ability tests measure physical abilities such as strength, eye-hand coordination, and manual dexterity. These abilities can be practiced and perfected, and are usually measured by some type of performance test. Psychomotor tests are popular because they apparently measure what is important for performance on the job. In addition, they often measure skills that are important for jobs and little evidence of disparate impact occurs when they are used. Personality tests measure traits, or tendencies to act, that are relatively unchanging in a person. Personality can be measured in two ways: self-report inventories and projective techniques. A self-report inventory is a paper-and-pencil measure in which an applicant responds to a series of statements that might or might not apply to that applicant. Some of these inventories such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) focus on “abnormal” personality traits such as schizophrenia, paranoia, and psychopathology. Others such as the California Personality Index (CPI) focus on “normal” personality traits such as introversion versus extraversion, dominance, and masculinity versus femininity. The other type of personality measure is known as a projective technique. This approach involves showing an individual an ambiguous stimulus, such as an inkblot or a fuzzy picture and then asking what he or she “sees.” Because there is nothing representative to see, whatever the applicant reports is presumed to be reflective of his or her personality. Some critics believe they can lead to legal problems, whereas others disagree whether cognitive ability tests (especially intelligence tests) or personality tests provide the most useful information for selection decisions. Regardless of the merits of these arguments, however, both personality and cognitive ability remain popular criteria in selection techniques, as do all employment tests in general. Integrity tests attempt to assess an applicant’s moral character and honesty. Most of these tests are straightforward and include questions such as “Do you think most people would cheat if they thought they could get away with it?” and “Have you ever taken anything that didn’t belong to you at work?” Other tests are based more on personality measures. The use of integrity tests is growing dramatically, with several million administered annually in the United States. Despite their popularity, however, there are important issues involved with their use in selection settings. First, most of the evidence about their accuracy has been supplied by the publishers of the test, which raises the possibility of a conflict of interest. Second, these tests may do a good job of identifying potential “thieves,” but many others individuals not identified by the tests steal and simply do not get caught. Finally, some applicants find these tests invasive and respond negatively to them. C. Work Simulations Work simulations (sometimes referred to as work samples) require an applicant to perform tasks or job-related activities that simulate or represent the actual work for which the person is being considered. In-basket exercises, which consists of collections of hypothetical memos, letters, and notes that require prioritization and responses, are sometimes used in management simulations. D. Personal Interviews Although tests are popular, the most widely used selection technique in most organizations is the employment interview. Interviews have traditionally been defined as face-to-face conversations between prospective job applicants and representatives of the organization. In any case, three different types of interviews are commonly encountered. In a structured employment interview, the interviewer works from a list of standard questions that are presented to every candidate, by every interviewer. In the semistructured employment interview, major or key questions are decided in advance and provided for each interviewer, but the interviewer is also given the prerogative to ask follow-up questions to probe the interviewee’s specific answers. There are no predetermined questions in the unstructured employment interview. In addition to these basic types, another form of interview has been gaining popularity. A situational interview asks the applicant questions about a specific situation to see how he or she would react. In other cases, rather than ask about something that has already happened, the interviewer might ask the applicant to imagine a situation that has not yet occurred. Interviewers generally prefer unstructured interviews because they believe these interviews allow them to get richer information and provide the freedom to make employment decisions on their own. But evidence suggests that structured interviews are much better predictors of subsequent job performance than are unstructured interviews, and situational interviews are even better at predicting future job performance. However, it is more difficult to establish the job relatedness of interviews, partly because of the prevalence of interview errors. Interviewers make the first impression error tend to make a decision early in the interview process. The contrast error occurs when the interviewer is unduly influenced by other people who have been interviewed. Similarity errors, on the other hand, occur when the interviewer is unduly influenced by the fact that the interviewee is similar to the interviewer in one or more important ways. Another type of error interviewers make is that of nonrelevancy error. A final type of error that is common in interview situations has to do with the interviewer’s knowledge of the job. E. Other Selection Techniques References and Recommendations The job applicant is usually asked to provide either letters of recommendation or the names and addresses of individuals who may be contacted to write such letters. References and recommendations are often of little real value. There is also a growing concern for legal liability in the preparation of recommendation letters. Job applicants have sued people who wrote negative letters of recommendation that were the bases for the individuals not being offered employment. Assessment Centers Another selection technique that is used widely, but only for the selection of managers, is the assessment center. An assessment center is not a physical location but is instead an approach to selecting managers based on measuring and evaluating their ability to perform critical work behaviors. The individuals to be assessed are brought together in a single place such as the company’s training headquarters or perhaps a conference facility at a hotel. While there, they undergo a series of tests, exercises, and feedback sessions. A normal assessment-center schedule lasts two to three days and involves ten to fifteen individuals at any one time. During the assessment center these individuals may undergo experiential exercises; group decision-making tasks; case analyses; individual employment tests, such as personality inventories and so forth; role-playing exercises; and other methods for assessing their potential skills and abilities. Current managers oversee the assessment and serve as evaluators. This suggests that assessment centers may be quite useful, but there are some disadvantages as well. The most critical is that assessment centers are rather expensive to run, especially when considering the lost productivity of both the candidates and the assessors. IV. The Selection Decision The final step in the selection process is deciding whom to hire. A. Multiple Indicators By using multiple approaches, the organization is able to counterbalance the measurement error in one selection technique against another, and it is also able to base decisions on the basis of more complete information. The organization must decide if a candidate must pass some minimum requirement on every selection technique, or if a high score in one area can compensate for a lower score somewhere else. By using multiple approaches, the organization is able to counterbalance the measurement error in one selection technique against another, and it is also able to base decisions on the basis of more complete information. The hiring decision may also be complicated by the fact that the person hired may not be the one who is ranked first on the selection criteria. An organization might select a person who has “acceptable” levels of the requisite KSAs but who is a better “fit” with the culture and style of the organization. Thus, the organization could use any decision rules it wished to select among the people in such a cluster without sacrificing performance on the job. This procedure, known as banding, allows an organization to select an applicant, for example, from some underrepresented group in the organization while still ensuring high performance standards.
HR in the 21st Century: The Converse of In-Person Communication A job interview is a job interview, and interviews conducted on the phone pose all the challenges of a face-to-face interview—and then some. One needs to take telephone interviewing seriously because many corporations now use them to prescreen applicants, and more importantly, because some HR departments rely on phone interviews exclusively. In one gets invited to a telephone interview, here are a few tips to remember: be flexible; prepare for the interview; be positive; know what one’s talking about and be specific; refer to one’s notes; take the initiative; know when a topic’s been covered (and when the conversation’s over). Microsoft’s Matt Aberham offers five ways to avoid failing at a telephone interview: keep track of the time; answer the question instead of trying to sell yourself; talk about “me,” not “we”; be concrete instead of abstract; and don’t ask “How’d I do?”
B. Selection Errors No selection system is perfect, and an organization will always make at least an occasional selection error and hire the wrong person. Actually, two basic types of selection errors can be made: false positives and false negatives. In each case, the decision maker examines the information available, predicts whether the applicant will ultimately succeed or fail on the job, and then decides to hire or reject the person on the basis. In each case, some of the predictions are correct and others are incorrect; these situations are illustrated in Figure 7.6. The figure shows that some of the people predicted to be successful and who are hired will in fact succeed. Quadrant I represents the false positives: the applicants who are predicted to be successful and who are therefore hired, but who ultimately fail. Quadrant IV represents the false negatives: the applicants who are predicted to fail and so are not hired. If they had been hired, however, they would have been successful. It would seem obvious that selection systems that minimize selection errors will be more effective for the organization, but it is not possible to minimize both types of errors at the same time, and so decisions must be made concerning which type of decision is more costly for the organization. Specifically, it is possible to minimize the number of poor performers that are hired by using more rigorous tests or challenging interviews to make selection decisions. The information in Figure 7.6 also provides some insight into the issue of test validity. If a test is valid, then there should be many more “hits” than errors. C. Reliability and Validity Reliability and validity are important concepts for any psychological type of measurement and are especially important for establishing the “job relatedness” of a selection technique. Reliability Reliability refers to the consistency of a particular selection device. Specifically, it means that the selection device measures whatever it is supposed to measure, without random error. The fact that a test is relatively free of random error should also indicate that the test can produce consistent scores. Validity Validity refers to the extent to which a measure or indicator is in fact a real reflection of what it is assumed to be. Criterion-related validity refers to the extent to which a particular selection technique can accurately predict one or more elements of performance. Criterion-related validity is most typically demonstrated by establishing a correlation between a test or measured performance in a simulated work environment with measures of actual on-the-job performance. Different relationships, or correlations, are illustrated in Figure 7.7. It is important that both the test and other selection devices be reliable and that the measure of performance or success be reliable. Correlations between predictor scores and job performance will also be maximized if we have the complete range of both, scores on the predictor (selection technique), and scores on the criterion (job performance). D. Legal and Effectiveness Issues in Recruiting and Selection Two issues of importance for selection decisions, as well as recruiting, are an awareness of legal issues and the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of these activities. Legal Issues in Recruiting and Selection The Civil Rights Act (and other nondiscrimination legislation) applies to all employment decisions, but this legislation is clearly most critical for selection decisions. An organization faced with a prima facie case of discrimination must prove that the basis for the selection decision was job related, and this is demonstrated by establishing the validity of a selection instrument as described above. Evaluating Recruiting and Selection Because recruiting and selection are such vital parts of the HRM process for most organizations, it stands to reason that the organization will periodically evaluate their effectiveness. Utility analysis is an attempt to determine the extent to which a selection system provides real benefit to the organization. The actual formulas for assessing utility are beyond the scope of the current discussion, but it is worth noting that an assessment of utility requires calculating the costs involved in improving the hit rate, and the benefit of that improved hit rate, as well as the costs of making selection errors. V. Training and Development Once new employees have been hired, HR managers must take steps to ensure that they can perform to their full potential as soon as possible. This generally involves training and development. Employee training can be defined as a planned attempt by an organization to facilitate employee learning of job-related knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Employee training can be defined as a planned attempt by an organization to facilitate employee learning of job-related knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Development, on the other hand, usually refers to teaching managers and professionals the skills needed for both present and future jobs. Training usually involves teaching operational or technical employees how to do their jobs more effectively and/or more efficiently. Rather than focusing on specific job-related skills, development is more generally aimed at helping managers better understand and solve problems, make decisions, and capitalize on opportunities. Several basic steps in the design of any training or development program are illustrated in Figure 7.8. The process should begin with a needs analysis where human resource managers responsible for training and development determine the organization’s true needs vis-à-vis training. This analysis generally focuses on two issues: the organization’s job-related needs and the capabilities of the current workforce. As part of this analysis, the manager must carefully assess the company’s strategy, the resources it has available for training, and its general philosophy regarding employee training and development. Furthermore, it is important for the organization to decide whether it wishes to train employees for the present or more proactively train them for what is expected to come in the future. Once these needs are assessed, whether through direct observation, or some type of survey or interview process, the organization must determine its goals for training and development. The next step in the process is to decide between in-house versus outsourced training. Finally, once the organization has decided on whether to conduct training and development in-house or through outsourcing, it must decide upon the specific techniques to be used. For some situations, organizations might prefer to rely upon various work-based programs. Work-based programs tie the training and development activities directly to performance of the tasks. The most common method of work-based training is on-the-job training. Two other types of work-based training are apprenticeship programs and vestibule training. Apprenticeships involve a combination of on-the-job training and classroom instruction. Vestibule training involves a work-simulation situation in which the job is performed under a condition that closely simulates the real work environment. Instructional-based programs are also quite common, especially the lecture or discussion approach. In these situations, a trainer presents the material to those attending the program in a lecture format; although lectures continue to play a role in most training programs, there is evidence that their use has been declining, and they are being replaced with training outside the classroom, primarily using electronic technologies. Another instructional-based program for training and development is computer-assisted instruction. In this situation, a trainee sits at a personal computer and operates software that has been developed specifically to impart certain material to the individual. Additionally, another method that involves basic instruction as a training device is programmed instruction. A. Management Development The training and development issues are applicable to both standard training programs and development programs. This process involves more generalized training for future managerial roles and positions rather than training that is specific to an immediately relevant task. As a result, managerial training usually involves attending a series of training programs over a period of time rather than attending a single program. B. Organizational Development Organizational development (OD) is a system-wide effort, managed from the top of the organization, to increase the organization’s overall performance through planned interventions. The technique relies heavily upon behavioral science technology although the development activities target the individual, the purpose is to ultimately change the way the entire organization operates. Different OD techniques are widely used. Survey feedback involves having employees respond to questionnaires about attitudes and perceptions of leadership styles, then sharing the results of the survey with everyone involved, including managers and supervisors. When OD is undertaken to solve a specific problem, such as interpersonal conflict, techniques such as third-party peacemaking may be used. Here a neutral third party, often an OD consultant from outside the organization, hears both sides in a conflict. He or she then helps the parties develop satisfactory solutions or compromises so that everyone can win. Finally, in process consultation the OD consultant observes managers in the organization to develop an understanding of their communication patterns, decision-making and leadership processes, and methods of cooperation and conflict resolution. The consultant provides feedback and recommendations to the managers about how to improve these procedures. At some point, when change begins to spread throughout the organization, one can actually talk about “organizational learning” taking place. It refers to the process by which an organization “learns” from past mistakes and adapts to its environment. C. Evaluating Training and Development The purpose of training and development is to enact fundamental change in individual performance behavior (or other outcomes), and it is relatively easy to quantify such changes, making evaluation more straightforward. This type of evaluation might be relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean there are no issues to consider. The most important is to determine if there is an actual change in the behavior being targeted. Evaluating management development programs is a bit more problematics because the training is really geared at helping managers to prepare for future jobs. Therefore, it may require a longer period of time and outcome measurement to evaluate these programs. Instructor Manual for Human Resources Angelo Denisi, Ricky Griffin 9781285867571
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