Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lecture: 4
Resource Strength & Organizational Capabilities
The best companies use a variety of practices to develop their knowledge base and
build intellectual capital:
1. Spend considerable effort in screening and evaluating job applicants, selecting
only, those with suitable skill sets, energy, initiative, judgment, and aptitudes
for learning and adaptability to the company’s work environment and culture.
Many companies take extraordinary pains to seek out the right people to fill
job openings- in 1997, Southwest Airlines got 150,000 resumes but hired only
5,000 people.
2. Put employees through training programs that continue throughout their
careers.
3. Give them challenging, interesting, and skills-stretching assignments.
4. Rotate them through jobs that have great content and wider span functional
and geographic boundary.
5. Encourages employees to be creative and innovative and to submit ideas for
new products or businesses. Progressive companies work hard at creating a
work environment where work ideas and suggestions bubble up from below
rather than proceed from the top down. Employees are made to feel their
opinions count.
6. Foster a stimulating and engaging work environment, such that employees will
consider the company “a great place to work”.
7. Exert efforts to retain high-potential, high performing employees with salary
increases, performance bonuses, stock options and equity ownership, and other
long-term incentives.
8. Average performers are coached to do better, while under performers and
benchwarmers are weeded out.
• The company’s core competencies concentrates in efforts and talent than rivals
on deepening and strengthening these competencies.
• A company’s selected bases of competences need to be broad enough and
flexible enough to respond to an unknown future as customers’ expectation
gradually changes from time to time.
The Strategic Role of Employee Training Training and retraining are important when
a company shifts to a strategy requiring different skills. competitive capabilities,
managerial approaches, and operating methods. Training is also strategically
important in organizational efforts to build skills-based competencies.