Abstract
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Abstract: This comparative study of human capital development and organizational practices examines public administrators’ perceptions of organizational human capital utilization, its causes and effects. It develops and tests an integrated model of utilization and its correlates in public sector organizations. The analysis is based on a recent survey of public administrators (n=540) in two countries—Oman and Saudi Arabia. The study findings a significant, and largely ignored, problem in the development and management of public sector organizations: “human capital resource underutilization”, indicating that skills and abilities of public administrators, although relatively and increasingly abundant, are invariably underutilized. The results show that competence utilization is closely related certain organizational practices, namely power-influence sharing in decision making, area of expertise-job content matching, qualification-job requirements matching, and the use of work-teams. Effective utilization results in increasing satisfaction, worker’s retention, and effectiveness and quality of decisions. The study has implications for organizational development and innovation. Without effective mechanisms to activate and utilize human capital resources, additional skill development might prove ineffective and largely irrelevant to performance improvements and overall effectiveness of governance system.
1. Introduction
Building and strengthening human capital through education and training programs has been a major goal of public sector development. These policies were consistent with public sector development and economic modernization models that emphasize the role of human capital and capable bureaucracies as the prime mover of development. The underlying assumption of this approach is that “once capabilities are in place, the various entities in the public sector will be endowed with the ability to undertake the developmental tasks that government requires, to use resources efficiently, to solve fresh problems as they arise, and to sustain increasingly complex and sophisticated activities over time” (Esman, 1991).
While organization-wide adoption of various skill-knowledge building schemes is quite widespread in both public and private sectors, research on the centrality of human capital resources utilization and its correlates has been relatively scant within public management and development administration literature. There is an abundance of research on almost all work attributes and control institutions but little that is relevant to the assessment of competence activation and utilization and their effect on work-related outcomes. There is a general tendency among economists and management development specialists to “naively” assume that all good things go together-- improvements in performance will automatically ensue as investment in human capital resources and adoption of technical innovations increase.
In spite of this inadequate attention given to the complexity of underutilization and organizational practices and structures necessary to deal with it, I argue here that if human capital resources are not activated and used or not used properly, the desired effects of their accumulation are “lost.” In cases of underutilization, organizations experience considerable losses due to reductions in effectiveness, productivity, satisfaction, and worker alienation. The greater the level of underutilization, the lower the return from investment in human capital and the lower the benefits accruing to the organization’s stakeholders including the public, which ultimately pays for such investments and immensely benefits from the nurturing of knowledgeable and engaged workforce.
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