The ATHENA Competency Framework: An Evaluation of Its Validity According to Instructional Designers and Human Resource Development Professionals.

This chapter provides human resource development (HRD) scholars and professionals with statutes and regulations that affect HRD scholarship and practice. The most important skills and competencies for HRD scholars and professionals to manage legal regulations and standards effectively are administration, treatment of participants, business skills, global mindset, industry knowledge, interpersonal skills, integrated talent management, and change management. These skills and competencies directly influence how HRD professionals interact and collaborate with others to improve employee behavior on the job. Technology skills may supplement these skills and competencies, but people-to-people interactions are essential for improved legal and ethical decision-making. HRD professionals must possess these skills and competencies to develop effective ethical and legal training programs and resources to ensure the economic success of organizations. HRD professionals can help to reduce problems and liability risks for their organization by helping all employees understand how important it is to treat each other fairly on the job. HRD scholars and professionals can design education and training using proven strategies to increase employee effectiveness in making ethical decisions and understanding legal statutes. HRD professionals must also understand economics and its role in the success of the organization. Exploring how to help organizations integrate Gig economy workers into the workforce is also a role of HRD professionals and scholars.

The purpose of this article is to explore the competencies required and exhibited by human resource development (HRD) professionals during a crisis. Keeping the current COVID‐19 pandemic in the foreground, we examined the industrial, change management, and crisis management literature to illustrate how HRD professionals successfully helped their organizations overcome organizational challenges imposed by the pandemic. We propose some essential competencies that HRD professionals, as change agents, need to support organizations to survive a crisis in the long term. At the core of our model is learning, unlearning, and relearning. HRD professionals can develop the core competencies in conjunction with essential competencies such as flexibility, agility, thoughtfulness, effective communication, critical thinking, and creativity. Through our conceptual competency model, we propose that HRD can prepare its professionals holistically to support leaders and employees during a crisis.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore multiple perspectives on managerial coaching: why and how managers engage, employees and human resource development (HRD) professionals’ perspectives on the use and how HRD and managers can better support each other with it.Design/methodology/approachThis study used secondary analysis of empirical data already collected through a transnational study from 20 different medium-size to large organisations in the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. For this study, 58 interviews referring to coaching were analysed from 18 of these organisations, from these 3 different countries and from 3 stakeholder groups: managers, employees and HRD professionals.FindingsFindings show that managers perform a variety of “on the job” informal coaching roles and that HRD professionals lead the more formal aspects. Managers felt that HRD support was limited and hoped for more. A limited number of employees mentioned coaching, but those that did highlighted the different types of coaching they received in the workplace, referring to managers but with little recognition of HRD’s role. HRD professionals shared how they support managers through both informal and formal coaching approaches, but this was not fully acknowledged by neither managers nor employees.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study contribute to the literature on devolved HRD practices, highlighting that managers are engaging more in managerial coaching with their teams, that potentially employees are not that aware of this and that managers and employees are not fully aware of HRD’s contribution to supporting coaching and feel they could do more. As a result, this study suggests that HRD professionals have a clear role to play in creating and leading the supportive organisational culture for coaching to thrive, not only in setting the “coaching scene” for managers to work within but also through offering support for long-term capacity building for all employees.Originality/valueThrough the diffusion of key HRD activities into managerial roles, and while internal coaching is gaining more momentum, managers now step up when coaching their teams. This study extends the limited prior research on managers’ and others’ (employees and HRD) beliefs about the coaching role in the workplace. This study highlights the changing role of the manager, the need for HRD to offer more support for the joint role that managers are taking (manager and coach) and the partnership potential for HRD professionals to include all stakeholders including employees.

This article presents a model of the levels of involvement and key strategic roles of human resource development (HRD) professionals during mergers and acquisitions (M&A), as supported by literary findings. Traditionally, mergers and acquisitions are initiated by the parent company’s finance expertise, with little or no input from its HRD expertise. Often, when HRD is involved in the process, it becomes involved during the postacquisition period. This oversight has been noted as a primary cause of failed M&A. Employees, the focus of HRD, are the vital means through which organizations improve their financial, organization, process, and job performance. Because such improvements are the primary goals of M&A, it is essential that HRD professionals are involved early in the M&A process. More specifically, HRD professionals must be involved in due diligence and integration planning activities. Additionally, the article explores the relationship between levels of involvement and postacquisition integration success.

Purpose This paper aims to identify the essential skills required by Human Resource Development (HRD) professionals to effectively respond to the various modes of labour organisation implemented due to the mandatory lockdown imposed by the Portuguese government in March 2020 as well as implications for learning and development (L&D) issues. Design/methodology/approach Data is based on 34 semi-structured interviews with HRD professionals from companies in different activity sectors. Findings The results reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the development of socio-emotional skills among HRD professionals such as creativity, improvisation, self-exploration, innovation, collaboration, team spirit, resilience, flexibility, problem-solving, adaptability, priority management, emotional intelligence, social influence, social contact, interpersonal relationships, communication and online learning development. Research limitations/implications It will be interesting for future research to explore “what” and “how” HRD managers are planning, organising and implementing training and development plans to improve the skills of remote workers, which tend to grow in a post-pandemic COVID-19 phase. Practical implications This research emphasises the importance of HRD managers’ role in better coordinating the work of employees who are physically distant from the company. It also highlights the need for different skills required for effective digital HRD, support and monitoring of remote employees. The results provide important inputs to design and implement effective L&D programs for professionals working remotely and to reinforce the HRD role in organisations. Originality/value The research is original for twofold reasons: 1) HRD professionals are usually not trained to manage remote workers, which also means that they probably lack the skills to take the most out of remote working models; and 2) HRD professionals and the HRD function need to address the skills required to successfully implement flexible forms of work organisation as well as to implement adequate L&D policies to answer remote work practices.

1 A Capsule Summary of the Book In its recent survey, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) identified the shortage of a skilled workforce, including science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates, and demographic challenges such as the succession of a large number of retiring baby boomers among the top 10 trends for 2013 (SHRM 2013). In addition to the above issues, the authors of the textbook reviewed herein emphasize that organizations and human resource development (HRD) professionals are currently facing a number of further challenges related to global competition, the growing diversity of the workforce, the promotion of lifelong and organizational learning, and ethical issues. Throughout the textbook the authors seek to address these challenges by describing the essence of HRD practices with respect to various aspects of organizational life. In doing so, they underscore the interrelations between HRD and other fields of human resource management (HRM) and focus on real-life examples and practical caveats related to HRD work. For instance, in addition to detailed descriptions of principal human resource activities related to training and development or the emphasis on core HRD applications, the authors outline the possible suboptimal outcomes of recruiting practices (p. 304) and discuss practical topics and examples such as infringements of copyright (p. 160) and the ethical behavior of HRD professionals (p. 170). The practical relevance of the book is also underscored by the emphasis on involving trade unions as facilitators of HRD measures and programs such as technical training (pp. 281-283), counseling (p. 329), assistance (p. 334), or organizational development interventions (pp. 493-494). Thus, this book represents a truly comprehensive compendium of HRD issues, activities, and practices in modern organizations. 2 Objective and Target Audience The authors define the primary intended audience as undergraduate and graduate students on various courses related to business management and administration. In an effort to achieve this goal, the textbook successfully provides both an introduction to the field as well as a comprehensive summary of the major topics related to HRD, supported by multiple cases and exercises. However, it is also stated by the authors that the book can serve as a guide for HRD professionals, managers, and supervisors (p. xiv). Indeed, in addition to the practical relevance of the text described above, one of its specific strengths is its focus on return on investment or the effectiveness of the respective HRD programs and measures (an example on p. 191). In addition, important features of the book are detailed descriptions of academic studies on each of the presented topics, including analyses and critiques of the extant research and implications for further investigations in the respective fields. Thus, this textbook may also be equally interesting to junior scholars who are looking for a basic summary of research in one of the HRD topics. 3 Structure and Contents The book consists of three parts divided into 15 chapters. 3.1 Part I Part I (Chapters 1-3) is dedicated to the foundations of HRD and starts with an introduction to the field. Here, the authors present the historical development and current status of the discipline, show the relationship between HRD and HRM and its subfields, describe the specifics of the HRD profession, outline the current challenges faced by HRD professionals, and build the basic framework of the HRD process consisting of an assessment of HRD needs, the design of effective HRD programs, and the evaluation and implementation of HRD programs. The second chapter is dedicated to the topic of employee behavior and its influencing factors. It covers the major external aspects affecting employee behavior and presents the main theories of motivation along with further internal factors influencing employee behavior such as attitudes, knowledge, skills, and abilities. …

Connecting ethics and diversity using diversity intelligence (DQ) will allow human resource development (HRD) scholars and professionals to improve the success of diversity initiatives within organizations. The ethics of employees ultimately determine the implementation success of organizational policies. Employees must have the ethical wherewithal to promote and support diversity efforts in the workplace. Diversity intelligent decisions are sometimes both legal and ethical decisions. DQ can help leaders make ethical decisions. One unethical or illegal decision can be one too many for an organization. HRD scholars and professionals can help leaders build DQ and facilitate the integration of ethics and diversity through their education and training programs. The importance of management buy-in and the top ten challenges facing HRD professionals in the workplace are discussed. HRD professionals must focus on the root causes of diversity problems in the workplace and stop expecting the protected class members to be strong in the face of repeated discrimination at work. Eliminating these problems for all employees may allow all employees to reach their full potential. HRD scholars and professionals must help promote the development of an ethical culture in the workplace that values diversity.

This qualitative study describes the involvement of human resource development (HRD) professionals in the investigative phase of merger and acquisitions (M&As). Telephone interviews were completed with 38 HRD professionals and 17 business managers in 12 organizations that had undergone M&As between 1996 and 1999. The results show that there is some cognizance between business managers and HRD professionals on what HRD professionals do during an M&A. What is most significant, however is that the activities identified by both business managers and HRD professionals are all human‐capital related; this shows that business managers and some organizations are not only involved in finance related but also human capital due‐diligence during an M&A. The study results show that M&A activities are team‐oriented and HRD professionals need to be prepared to work in different projects during an M&A, especially during the investigative phase. The notion that HRD professionals will be solely working on HRD‐related activities is non‐existent during the investigative phase of an M&A.

The problem and the solution. Initiatives intended to bring about positive organizational change and improvement often fail to achieve their intended goals. Although hindsight can be used to generate a list of reasons why a program failed, these reasons tend to be symptomatic of the real problem. The examples presented in this article are representative of the type of program and the nature of the decision making that HRD (human resource development) professionals could be involved in or responsible for. To truly be strategic within the organization, HRD professionals need to take a leadership role in anticipating and preventing program failures. This means that HRD professionals need to understand and be aware of the implications of bounded rationality in decision making.

PurposeMarginalization exists in many organizations, despite a zero-tolerance stance on discrimination, abuse and harassment. Human resource development (HRD) professionals are increasingly asked to respond to the calls for crucial conversations on race and diversity. However, traditional HRD methods and tools may not be sufficient to address and eradicate racism in the workplace. The usage of testimonio could enable oppressed groups to communicate their narratives to counter stereotypes. This paper aims to describe testimonio and the various ways it can be used as a research methodology and to perturb the dominant practices in the workplace.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper uses testimonio, a narrative methodology with Latin American roots in indigenous oral storytelling, to expand beyond Eurocentric qualitative approaches to capture the voices of marginalized groups. This study gives examples and theorizes how leaders, including human resource professionals, may use this approach to give voice to underrepresented stakeholders in the margins of organizations. Testimonio serves as a non-Eurocentric framework and venue to legitimize their stories. Their voices are assets, enriching while transforming and perturbing and so are needed for communities and organizations to foster a just and sustainable culture and climate.FindingsThe use of testimonio as an HRD approach to amplify unrepresented voices in the workplace may be an asset to HRD professionals. However, to realize the full potential of this research tradition in HRD, researchers and practitioners must create more space where trust is present for these groups to tell stories that matter most to them.Research limitations/implicationsThis study on the testimonio approach provides a view into organizational power dynamics and voices from the margins. It serves as a means to acknowledge the voices of underrepresented stakeholders in the workplace. HRD scholars should contribute to organizational effectiveness and inclusive workplace climate by using scholarship to highlight the harm of marginalizing policies and behaviors.Practical implicationsTestimonio implies that HRD practitioners in positions of privilege should use their authority to foreground the voices of marginalized individuals who are typically silenced. This can be accomplished by prioritizing unheard voices in the work of HRD professionals. Testimonio as a methodological approach and workplace tool highlights the personal experiences of oppressed groups who experience social injustice, particularly racism. This method encourages organizations that do not operate in a culturally sensitive and inclusive environment to reconsider the discourse that influences their social position.Originality/valueWhile there is a clear need to address inequities, few practical inquiry tools are presented. Moreover, through their epistemologies and research procedures, scholars and practitioners may unintentionally maintain and reinforce existing inequitable structures and processes. This paper presents testimonio as a non-Western alternative to Eurocentric qualitative research methodologies to perturb dominant practices in HRD.

Problem Organizations face increasing complexity in implementing artificial intelligence (AI) while maintaining a focus on human resource development. Human Resource Development (HRD) professionals struggle to balance technological advancement with human capital development amidst volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. Solution We propose a “nested complexity” framework that conceptualizes AI implementation challenges as multi-layered complexities spanning technological, ethical, and regulatory dimensions, nested within broader environmental complexity. Through a narrative literature review and conceptual integration, we develop practical guidelines for assessing organizational readiness, developing learning strategies, and managing change during AI implementation. Stakeholders This framework provides HRD professionals with structured approaches for leading AI initiatives while prioritizing human development. It enables organizations to develop implementation strategies that balance technological advancement with human capabilities, offering practical tools for building organizational capacity that supports successful AI integration while maintaining focus on human capital development.

In terms of training evaluation, most human resource development (HRD) or training professionals as program suppliers are usually limited to course-level trainee satisfaction. The training evaluation practice framework can be originally linked to Kirkpartrick (1959). The purpose in this study was to explore the key important factors that affect the relationship between HRD professionals and training evaluation by establishing a decision-making model of training evaluation practices using fuzzy concept (Van Laarhoven & Pedrycz, 1983) and grey relation analysis (Deng, 1982), that is, a quantitative method. This could guide HRD or training professionals when making the decisions about which evaluation level can be viewed as the priority to be implemented by looking at their own organizational characteristics.

A classic question facing every organization is, “Who should be responsible for the training/learning process?” Some contend HRD professionals should be responsible for this because they possess advanced knowledge of adult learning theory and maintain excellent instructional skills. Thus, many organizations still rely on HRD (human resource development) professionals to provide training to their employees. These individuals typically are experts in the design, development, and presentation of training programs. Most possess excellent interpersonal and communications skills, relate well to others, possess outgoing and enthusiastic personalities, the ability to engage people for long periods of time, and a solid foundation in adult learning, theory, and practice (Galbraith, 1991), While most trainers are highly talented professionals and are dedicated to employee well-being, learning, and change, they have a limited impact on improving organizational performance. One reason is that most HRD practitioners are not held accountable for improving employee performance, nor are they responsible for conducting performance appraisals used to improve employee performance. Furthermore, HRD professionals are not in a position to provide performance feedback and reinforcement so critical to learning transfer. As a result, some contend that managers should be responsible for employee learning because they are accountable for their performance output and quality. Thus, providing strategies used to transform managers into learning champions as well as an examination of alternative roles for HRD professionals will be provided.

Human resource development (HRD) professionals are increasingly incorporating technology into their work activities. However, research that examines the ethics in the use of technology by HRD professionals is still underrepresented in the literature. This article first conducts a PEST (political, economic, social-cultural, and technological) analysis by examining a number of important general and specific trends that affect the use of technology in HRD. It then discusses some implications with regard to these trends and their impacts on HRD practices.

Purpose– There is an ongoing shortage of talented supply chain managers with the necessary skills and business-related competencies to manage increasingly complex and strategically important supply chain processes. The purpose of this paper is to propose that organizations can create and maintain competitive advantage by leveraging the expertise of human resource development (HRD) professionals to provide a range of developmental and change-oriented interventions related to critical supply chain manager skill sets that are currently in short supply.Design/methodology/approach– This is a conceptual paper.Findings– This is a conceptual paper.Practical implications– Supply chain management (SCM) decisions significantly influence financial performance since firms expend up to 75 percent of their revenue on supply chain activities. HRD professionals' intervention capabilities in training and development, organizational development and change management uniquely equip them to disseminate a deeper and broader understanding of the SCM concept within organizations, to help prioritize the development of supply chain managers and to address the complex interpersonal issues associated with helping people to work together collaboratively to foster operational innovation and make increasingly complex supply chain processes function effectively.Originality/value– The requisite skill sets for effective supply chain managers are described, linkages between HRD and SCM are highlighted, and areas of HRD professionals' expertise that can be exploited to better develop supply chain managers' skill sets and competencies are considered.