A Study on Knowledge Management Involvement in Improving Human Resource Management in Organizations

Abstract

In light of today’s economic volatility and rapid growth of competition, each and every business is struggling to maintain their sustainability in market. At this point, organizations have now understood the value of having a competent workforce that would generate quality outputs. Therefore, human resource is now concerned as the prime asset for the company which executes all the operations of the company towards success by integrating their knowledge and skills over the job duties. As a result, HRD has given a major concern which is about developing the key competencies of the individuals to perform current and future jobs effectively, with HRD functions such as; training and development, career development and other learning activities. Thinking about the possible changes of HRD, it will emerge in two directions; individual changes and organizational changes. Individual change model focuses on how individual’s life and job could be changed via trainings and career developments, whereas organizational change model focuses on how the individual changes would ultimately result in the changes of organizational performance and its development. The attempt within this study was made to evaluate the impact of HRD over the organizational changes, for which a manufacturing organization was selected for the investigation. As the method of HRD for the study, training and development was selected and on the job training session was designed for a group of factory staff who were the sample for the study, and was implemented carefully. At the end of the training period, a performance evaluation was conducted to the entire factory staff to identify the contribution on organizational performance via each individual’s performance, with the careful supervision of HR department and the support of supervisors as well. Finally, the results were compared between those who were given the training and those who were not, and thereby checked how far the HRD can occur organizational changes in terms of its performance. Findings of this study emphasized that those who were given on the job training had achieved the given targets and thereby supported to produce high quality outputs more efficiently, which had caused increased production of the factory. Findings also showed that, those individuals have gained the given new knowledge and have applied them in their job duties. At the same time, the staff members who were not given the training had not indicated a similar performance and had not contributed to a significant improvement in overall production during the considered period of time.