Human resource management practices of manufacturing and engineering organisations in India : Lessons for the developing world

This study reviewed and categorised human resource literature into the triad areas of, human resource management (HRM), human resource development (HRD), and organisation development (OD). It further collated underlying concepts in HRM, HRD and OD and built a classificatory scheme, which was analysed, and found to compare favourably with the People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM), a concept known for higher organisational maturity. However, results from seven leading manufacturing and engineering companies in Pune (India) and interviews with fifteen HR experts revealed that the PCMM was an unknown quantity. Instead, companies and practitioners were found to be in favour of such mundane concepts as: 5-S, Kaizen, Sigma Six, performance management system (PMS), employee satisfaction surveys (ESS) and ISO standards, amongst others. That notwithstanding, the maturity levels of these companies were found to be high, over 73.2%, which was not expected as the above practices, unlike the P-CMM seem, disjointed. Thus the practices were further investigated to establish the extent to which they could contribute to organisational maturity. The investigation revealed that the practices are based on the Deming’s improvement cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Action, the very foundation of the P-CMM. It was thus observed that when a number of these practices are applied simultaneously, repeatable organisational processes are achievable hence the high maturity levels noted.


INTRODUCTION
This work was undertaken in Pune, India, as a lessonslearnt study for the Botswana engineering and technology institutions.It extends previous works, amongst others by Tjiparuro (2011), UNDP (2005), BNRSTP (2005), and Kgengwenyane (2001) that decried the state of research, science and technology in Botswana.Consequently, important lessons that could be learnt and leveraged from the organisational processes and practices of manufacturing and engineering companies in India were sought.The study is people-centred and derives its legitimacy from the position that an economy's capacity to create wealth is a function of its capacity to innovate, a capacity that resides in its people (Schipper and Swain, 2002).In fact, when it comes to innovation, the significance of people has become domineering rendering such concepts as learning organisation inadequate as without people organisations do not learn, people do (Freeman, 2008: p. 197).But the centrality of people to business is often neglected and that applies to Botswana.Notwithstanding its impressive political and economic successes, and the attendant epithets of Africa's model for success, shining example of democracy, or African Miracle, technologically, Botswana to-date still remains a laggard (Sebusang, 2003;UNDP, 2005).The country has a small base of researchers characterised by small growth rate and low GERD (gross expenditure on R&D) as a percentage of GDP.Compared to similar countries, Botswana's S and T resource base is very small with about 2,165 employees within the S and T system.Moreover, the proportion of its R&D personnel as a percentage of total employment is below optimal level at less than 2.7 researchers per 1000 employed (BNRSTP,2005: p. 28).Botswana also lags behind in scientific publications, considered a fair approximation of a country's active scientific manpower (Gaillard, 2010).In 2006, Botswana did not feature in Africa's share of scientific publications, and was beaten to 12 th place by Zimbabwe, at a time when Zimbabwe experienced mass exodus of its trained citizenry (Chingono, 2009).This situation has led to a number of remedial measures such as rationalisation or mergers being mooted by the government of Botswana, albeit without implementation.At any rate, Botswana's failure to attract meaningful foreign direct investment means competition between its industries is low, thus putting paid to any serious efforts to the implementation of strategic human resource management practices, as such invariably comes with layoffs.The effect of the absence of competition is well noted by amongst others (Bhatnagar, 2006;Sons, 2007;Bhatnagar and Sharma, 2005) especially in the Indian industry.Hence the question, what lessons can be gleaned from the Indian industrial environments.
Today, India is an innovation power house.Since the liberalisation of its economy in the early 1990s, its industrial sector had grown by leaps and bounds as a result of easier entry and greater participation by foreign companies.In 2006, India was a competitive playground to 15, 000 multi-national companies (MNCs) leading to a change in the dynamics of doing business in country (Sons, 2007).Local organisations adopted mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, joint ventures or strategic alliances as important instruments of strategic organisational change.The World Bank was to forecast that by 2020, India could become the fourth largest economy (Bhadnagar, 2006).Moreover, the sheer number of Indian population engaged in science and technology is staggering.Highly skilled human resources in science and technology (HRST) in India in 1991 numbered between 13 and 16 million with the number growing to approximately 25 million in 2000.Of these numbers, scientists and engineers accounted for at least 14% by 1991 (Khadria, 2004).Be that as it may, there could be no better place to undertake research on manufacturing and engineering companies in India than the City of Pune, often variously referred to as the Detroit of India or the Oxford of the East (Deshpande, 2011;Krishnamurthy, 2005).Pune is internationally renowned especially for its automobile and information technology industry, and over hundred educational institutions and nine universities.Thus, by investigating the dissemination of Peoples Capabilities Maturity Model (P-CMM) in this innovation power house, this study hoped to unearth valuable lessons from Pune's burgeoning industry.
Having thus introduced the research topic and problematized the industrial situations as they currently exist, the rest of this paper is organised as follows.Literature shall be reviewed next in order to better contextualise this study.Then the methodology including the research questions, their implementation approach and sample frame are given.This is followed by research findings, discussions conclusions, and finally research limitations.

LITERATURE REVIEW
The centrality of human capital is aptly captured by Ajitabh (2006, p. 41) when he says 'in [the] highly competitive world of today… the three mantras of success … are: people, people and people.'Hence, various human resource philosophies emerged to encapsulate this significance.Historically, human resources departments did not exist or at least not in their modern form.However, the ultimate emergence of human resource practices was inevitable as organisations grew in complexity accompanied by tremendous increase in human resources (Miles and Snow, 1984).Workforce became unionised especially after the First World War in the US bringing about specialized employee relations programs (Ruona and Gibson, 2004).In England, the shift from craftsmanship to the industrial revolution (Haslinda, 2009) played a very important part.So were the concomitant developments in organization theory, such as scientific management, scientific administration, or human relations which gave new dimensions to the subject (Malik, 2009;Haslinda, 2009).
HR in India, or what Rao (1999) calls HRD, started to be taken seriously when global competition brought with it the need to keep organisations afloat.Rao however decries that this only led to a mere relabeling of operations and functions with titles such as HRD managers, HRD centres or HRD conferences without tangible effect (Rao, 1999, p. 10).As a result of these superficial changes, expected results did not come, and 'many CEOs [began] to wonder why competence building was not taking place in spite of their large HD departments' (Rao, 1999, p. 10).Rao concluded that 'the old personnel function[s] … of a recruitment manager, compensation manager or rewards manager,… got back into the driver's seat with no focus on business goals and linkages, competency building, commitment building and culture building' (Rao, 1999, p. 11).
In any case, the HR field grew by leaps and bounds.Issues of competitive advantage became very important (Lengnick-Hall and Lengnick-Hall, 1988), as organisations or nations with larger stocks of human resources capital grew faster (Sequeira, 2006) and success came to be determined by decisions employees made or the behaviours in which they engaged (Ruona and Gibson, 2004).Generally, three perspectives came to dominate research in human resources, namely, human resource management (HRM), human resource development (HRD) and organisational development (OD) (Grieves and Redman, 1999;Brockbank, 1999;Ruona and Gibson, 2004).It is from these three dominant areas that myriad HR comparative studies ensued, ostensibly to address issues of efficiency.For instance, HRM practices have been related to the development of intellectual capital (Wright et al., 2001), knowledge creation linked to organisational learning (Snell et al., 1996), HRM practices (that is selection, training and development, and pay incentives) related to organizational social elements of trust and cooperation (Collins and Smith, 2006) and HRM practices of performance appraisal systems, incentive-based compensation, and internal career opportunities linked to better innovation and organisation processes (Jiminez-Jiminez and Sanz-Valle, 2005;Shipton et al., 2005).Of course non comparative studies have had their share, such as the categorisation of human resource best practices into task focused and person-focused activities (Major et al., 2007) or how management influence organizations in order to retain talent and stimulate innovativeness (Boersma, 2007) to name a few.
However, the multiplicity of HR tools only managed to deliver a suite of disjointed perspectives that its practitioners were yet to build into a coherent scientific system.In fact, it has been noted that most human resource frameworks tend to be isolationistic in approach, when research on the other hand show that organisational work practices are bettered from an integrated standpoint, as adoption of one HRM practice is effective when done in combination with one or more other HR practices (Som, 2007).That the different perspectives of HR are giving the field a foggy dimension has been aptly demonstrated by amongst others (McGuire and Cseh, 2006;Grieves and Redman, 1999;Evarts, 1998) to name a few.As a result, HR tools cannot provide the roadmap as to how these frameworks link up or interact with each other to provide the much needed competitive advantage, hence a need to find one.
Fortunately, such a method exists in the name of the People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM), a form of people management framework that evolved from the software development industry and applied with aplomb by Boeing, Ericsson, Lockheed Martin, Novo Nordisk IT A/S, and Tata Consultancy Services (Curtis et al., 2001).However, comparing the body of literature between the P-CMM and the triad HR perspectives is like comparing 'David and Goliath', with the P-CMM completely and absolutely overshadowed.But what is the P-CMM and how does it compare to the three general concepts: HRM, HRD and OD?This is an important question that will be explored in this paper.

People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM)
The P-CMM is well treated in its original classical treatise by Curtis et al. (2001) and this section does not attempt to reproduce it.In a synopsis, the P-CMM, essentially, Tjiparuro 10667 collates the best practices in HRM, HRD, and OD to transform organisations from ad hoc and inconsistently performed practices, to mature, disciplined and repeatable practices characterised by continuous improvement.The model involves five evolutionary steps that successively guide an organisation to greater maturity.At the very beginning, an organisation transforms from the chaotic initial level to the managed level, where basic HR practices get to be performed procedurally.Subsequently, HR practices get tailored towards the organisational business, a stage referred to as the defined level.Further improvement leads to the predictable level, which enjoins the organization to develop competency-based and high-performance workgroups, as well as to empirically evaluate how its workforce practices are meeting objectives.At the highest and last level in the model, the optimizing level, the organization looks continually for innovative ways to improve its workforce capability and to support them in their pursuit of professional excellence (Curtis et al., 2001).

The triad HR philosophies and P-CMM
The underlying principles of HRM and HRD have been explored very briefly by Haslinda (2009).Table 1 expands Haslinda's HRM and HRD principles and goes further to include the underlying concepts in OD.Using other specialist articles on HRM, HRD and OD by, amongst others, Ruona and Gibson (2004), Sekaran (2004) and Peck (2005), the concepts were extensively reviewed leading to a fairly representative classificatory scheme though not necessarily exhaustive.The process threads in P-CMM, on the other hand, are given in Table 2, which compares favourably with Table 1.The practical implication of this is that the P-CMM framework integrates otherwise disjointed practices for maximum competitiveness leading to a more systematic and pragmatic approach, thus seriously challenging the old piecemeal models of HRM, HRD and OD.Hence companies have started to take keen interest in P-CMM.Since the model is industry neutral, many non IT companies are also adopting it, with industries such as infrastructure and pharmaceuticals, especially in India, having adopted the framework.This is likely to grow as the P-CMM covers about 495 practices across 22 process areas ensuring that the requirements of various types of organisations are represented.Moreover, in comparison to other HR models the P-CMM Model is very comprehensive, easy to follow and implement (Ajitabh, 2006.)It is on the basis of the above superiority of the P-CMM and the striking similarities of its underlying principles to HRM, HRD and OD that this work sought to explore the extent to which the P-CMM is appreciated as an integrated evolutionary approach.Research question 1: Has your present organisation or any organisation you were associated with ever implemented the People-Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM)?
Research question 2: Would you briefly share your impressions about the practicality of the P-CMM (at least, three limitations of the method).
Research question 3: What would you consider to be the three most practical approaches to manage human resource in developing countries/India?
Research question 4: What does staff think about the project processes of their companies?
A questionnaire (Appendix 1) was prepared based on the four research questions.Companies with a staff compliment of over 100 people in Pune were identified and visited.With the help of the questionnaire the expert opinions of human resources managers of these companies with respect to their experience with the P-CMM, and its limitations, and the human resource practices used by their organisations were captured.This formed Part 2 of the questionnaire and it addressed the first three research questions.Part 3 of the questionnaire was adapted from the software process maturity questionnaire to help answer the fourth research question.In its entirety, the software process maturity questionnaire has 124 questions split across several topics to cover 18 key process areas (KPAs) of the capability maturity model (CMM).The questions do not even cover all key practices but had to be kept to 124 so that the questionnaire could be completed in an hour (Zubrow et al., 1994).In this study, this was still deemed too much.Thus the questionnaire was scaled down to 36 questions under five KPAs; requirements management, project planning, project tracking and oversight, project subcontractor management and lastly total quality management.For each company visited, at least 10 staff members directly involved in production and engineering works were asked to complete the questionnaire.Their impressions about their organisational maturity was determined by tallying their responses (Yes, No, Does Not Apply and Don't Know) for each question under each of the five KPAs.The total number of respondents from each organisation was also recorded.Then for each question, the ratio of Yeses, Noes, etc., was calculated as a percentage according to Equation (1).
Responses were interpreted as per Appendix 2, with a score above 60% for each KPA interpreted as an indication of higher maturity.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A total of seven engineering and manufacturing companies of various sizes were visited for both parts of the questionnaire.In respect of part 2; on the expert opinions of human resources managers and their experience with the P-CMM, its limitations, as well as their preferred human resource practices, a total of fifteen (15) experts in human resources, operation and production management, responded to the questionnaire, twelve (12) from the seven companies and two associated with the Indian Society of Training and Development (ISTD) or referred by the society.On what staff thinks about their organisational processes, part 4, staff from only four companies responded.
The results showed that none of the experts interviewed were aware of the existence of the P-CMM framework.These experts were so clueless of the framework that they could not even aver as to its limitations.On their preferred human resource practices, responses from the experts and the observed organisational processes on the shop floor showed strong adherence to such old, tried and tested concepts as: 5-S, Kaizen, Sigma Six, ISO certification, performance management system-PMS or employee satisfaction surveys-ESS.Incidentally, these organisations operate at world class level in terms of organisational, operations and workforce practices, and, according to their managers, business was good.Observed shop floor processes were without doubt among the best with well laid out machines, clean work areas, clear arrangement of incoming and processed materials, as well as well-defined walkways.
In addition, the capability maturity scores of at least four of the companies that responded was found to be very high, above 73.2% for most of the parameters, indicating very high maturity levels.Given such high scores, it appeared that approaches such as; total quality management, ISO, 5-S and performance management systems were propelling these organisations to higher levels of maturity.The question was why and how do these practices contribute to the evolutionary transformation of organisation in a manner akin to the P-CMM?In this paper, these instruments were squared against the PCMM to better understand why this could be possible.

Comparing organisational practices to P-CMM
Generally, about six predominant practises, namely: 5-S, Kaizen, Sigma Six, performance management system (PMS), employee satisfaction surveys (ESS) and ISO standards were observed at the surveyed companies.The processes, normally, associated with these practices are given in Table 4.As can be noted from Table 4, the first three practices (5-S, Kaizen and Six Sigma), though they can be applied to any aspect of life and deliver profound changes, are used more for processes improvement with the specific purpose of eliminating waste such as defects, transportation time, inventory, overproduction, waiting time, process set up time, or longer operation motions.Six Sigma, for instance, is known to lead to profitability through quantum gains in product/service quality, customer satisfaction and productivity (Antony and Banuels, 2002).These approaches are categorised as quality management systems (QMS), and are based on the Shewart-Deming improvement cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act).Coincidentally, this is the very foundation of P-CMM.Thus, QMS has the effect of bringing about repeatable and systematic ways of doing work, in line with the idea of process repeatability associated with the capability maturity models as already discussed in previous sections of this paper.
Related to the above is ISO which was found to be applied in all of the seven companies surveyed in one form or another.Essentially, ISO works by documenting a company's day to day processes in the form of quality manuals, keeping records, and subjecting its processes periodically to assessment by an approved external body.This process also operates along the Deming's quality circle.Generally, as reported in a survey of 160 Australian companies by Casadesus et al. (2001) ISO certification leads to increase in company quality awareness; increase in product quality awareness; improvement in management; improvement of customer relations; etc.
The other two practices, (performance management systems and people satisfaction surveys), pay particular emphasis on continuously improving people practices to archive organisational goals.The essence of performance management tools is to align individual's contribution to team or organisational goals.Thus performance management is an important managerial tool that directs employees' goals and behaviour towards the organization's strategic goals (Rachman-Moore and Kenett, 2006).If used properly performance management brings about a set of practices through which work is defined and reviewed, capabilities are developed, and rewards are distributed in organizations (Hannay, 2010).This therefore is a form of doing away with chaos and ensuring that work is done in a systematic and repeatable way as proposed by the P-CMM framework.
Employee satisfaction survey (ESS) on the other hand recognises that organisations by themselves cannot achieve their goals without their employees.This point has been stated bluntly in this paper by invoking Freeman (2008, p. 197) when he says 'the concept of the learning organisation has turned out to be inadequate: [for] organisations don't learn, people do.' Therefore organisations need to retain employees who share its values.Hence, the relevance of Vineet Nayar's philosophy of; employees first, customers second (Nayar, 2010).
By and large, almost all of the above practices have as their bases the Deming's improvement cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Action. Thus, though seemingly disjointed, they have the general effect of bringing about maturity in the manner in which work is done, at least in the narrow precincts of their disciplines.It therefore becomes highly probable that when a couple of these find simultaneous application in an organisation, a nearly holistic effect can be realised (Som, 2007).5-S, for instance, has been observed to be pivotal to Kaizen, a fitting prelude to total productive maintenance, providing a framework within which ISO standards can be built on, and, invariably, leads towards TQM (Warwood and Knowles, 2004).

Conclusions
This study collated underlying principles in HRD, HRM and OD.It compared these principles to the P-CMM to reveal striking similarities between the two frameworks.The study then sought to investigate if the industry is implementing the P-CMM.If not, the study sought to understand what industries consider to be the limitations of the framework.Over and above this, this study investigated the practical approaches that manufacturing and engineering companies in the industrial hub of Pune consider to be most practical for implementation.These approaches were compared and analysed against the P-CMM.
Results from this study show that the P-CMM is completely unknown, without a single HR director, expert, operations or production manager demonstrating knowledge of it.This response was from fifteen (15) out of a target of 40 experts, giving a response rate of 37.5%.Without knowledge of the P-CMM framework, these experts were unable to comment on its limitations.The most used human resources and organisational practices as submitted by these experts were found to be dominated by six main areas, namely: 5-S, Kaizen, Sigma Six, Performance Management System, Employee Satisfaction Surveys and ISO standards.When these practical approaches were compared to the P-CMM, the investigation found out that the underlying principles of these approaches imbue a significant level of order necessary for processes repeatability associated with capability maturity models.In fact, in four organisations, maturity was measured by the help of a capability Tjiparuro 10671 maturity questionnaire, and was found to be very high, above 73.2% for all four organisations, for most of the five parameters considered.As highlighted it can be concluded that when approaches such as; 5-S, Kaizen, Sigma Six, ISO, PMS and ESS are used in combination, a certain level of maturity evolution happens.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Time proved to be a very big inhibiting factor to this study.The envisaged Delphi approach (Okoli and Pawlowski, 2004) could not be applied as envisioned not only due to time constraints but also due to the zero response from the targeted experts.Of the 40 experts targeted, not a single one responded to the questionnaire nor did the subsequent follow ups elicit any results.Hence more research is needed in this direction to establish the opinion of experts on the viability of the people capability maturity model.The same situation stated earlier was also met with during the direct interactive interviews, especially with respect to part 2 of the questionnaire, whereby companies insisted on administering the questionnaire to their staff by themselves.The result was that most of these companies ultimately failed to live up to their promises and ended up not responding at all.To that extent, although the results obtained in this study are representative and showed a fairly consistent trend of the operations of all the companies visited, further work is needed in this direction especially with the involvement of someone well connected with the local industry.
Another area needing future attention is the modification of the questionnaire.During the survey, feedback from some respondents was that the four-scale questionnaire does not accord respondents a chance to give an indication of the percentage to which their organisations comply with the stated parameters.For instance, it was suggested that instead of using YES/NO, a scale of 1 to 10 would be better.Perhaps future work with this amendment in place would produce better results.

REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT 1.
Are customer requirements allocated to the product, or service used to establish a baseline for product or service engineering and management use?Are measurements used to determine the status of the activities for planning the project (e.g., completion of milestones for the project planning activities as compared to the plan)?

Table 4 .
Main practices and their activities.
Are measurements used to determine the status of the activities for project tracking and oversight (e.g., total effort expended in performing tracking and oversight activities)?Are the activities for project tracking and oversight reviewed with senior management on a periodic basis (e.g., project performance, open issues, risks, and action items)?Are measurements used to determine the status of the activities for managing subcontracts (e.g., schedule status with respect to planned delivery dates and effort expended for managing the subcontract)?Are the subcontract activities reviewed with the project manager on both a periodic and event-driven basis?Are the results of TQM reviews and audits provided to affected groups and individuals (e.g., those who performed the work and those who are responsible for the work)?Are measurements used to determine the cost and schedule status of the activities performed for TQM (e.g., work completed, effort and funds expended compared to the plan)?