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The purpose of this research is to examine how service enablers such as resource management and human resource management practices, identified in prior research as vital, influence both conformance quality and productivity performance. The paper also aims to study how the level of customer contact, a major service differentiator, could moderate the influence of such practices on performance.

Using sample data from 249 service firms in China, hierarchical a regression analyses is employed to test the research questions.

The results indicate that there are common resource management and human resource management practices that positively affect both conformance quality and productivity. Importantly, besides its direct and positive effect on conformance quality and on productivity performance, the level of customer contact was found to have a contingency effect on the relationships between resource management or human resource management practices, and conformance quality or productivity performance.

Future research should consider including other developing countries, more service industries, and a longitudinal study if possible.

Implications of the findings on theory in services and managerial practice in the context of China are offered.

The theoretical value of the research lies in identifying the factors that simultaneously affect both conformance quality and productivity (which are often seen as competing goals) in service sectors, and their dependency on the level of customer contact.

The perspectives of industry instructors from a case enterprise were adopted to analyze various contexts of internship implementation and to examine feasible strategies for incorporating internships in the human resource development process.

A Taiwanese enterprise stationed in China was selected for case study. This study focused on the 2019 summer internship program. Interviews were conducted with 23 industry instructors.

(1) Units should effectively employ interns by guiding them to learn by doing tasks. (2) Provide training and assign personal industry instructors to guide interns in learning by doing, thereby establishing workplace relationships in advance. (3) High-level leaders and senior managers must pay close attention to internship results and inspire industry instructors and interns to perform internship tasks. (4) Managers of internship units must participate in interviews to select potential employees that satisfy unit requirements. (5) Opportunities for university teachers to interact with enterprises and recommend interested students who learn knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics (KSAOs) that fulfill enterprise requirements should be increased.

Enterprises must systematically plan internship tasks, recruitment and selection, as well as practices and reports if they wish to employ interns as potential human resource.

This study used the practical perspectives of industry instructors to establish the contexts and strategies of intern training for human resource development. The results of this study are expected to provide a reference for enterprises in planning internship workplaces and increase their willingness to employ interns.

Aims to shed some light on the modalities and the need for human resources planning in Swaziland libraries. Systematic forecasts of the libraries′ future demand for, and supply of labour should be meticulously undertaken so that Swaziland libraries can put themselves in a better position to plan for the recruitment, selection, training, and career paths of staff. Swaziland′s lack of trained personnel with sufficient knowledge to handle the intricacies of automation has necessitated the external recruitment of expatriate staff, with serious implications for the budget. Swaziland assumed the chairmanship of the SADC Regional Training Council (RTC) which now controls the affairs of the Human Resources Development Sector. One of the projects of this sector has been to create a Regional Human Resource Information System (RHRIS). This project has provided guiding principles to those in the region whose responsibility is human resources planning and development. It is essential that SWALA should develop a human resources database for the library profession through its Sub‐Committee for Human Resources. The development of a human resources audit in Swaziland libraries will help to determine what skills, knowledge, and abilities are required for particular vacancies or jobs. The idea is to collect enough information which will enable library managers to match their employees to the available jobs.

Requirements of a project are found to change in various ways during the course of the same. Studies have investigated the effect of requirement volatility on different project parameters like effort, schedule, quality, etc. However, these studies have not looked into how different “patterns” of requirement volatility influence project quality; and which intervention strategies could be effective under the circumstances. This paper aims to address this issue.

The “system dynamics” approach has been used for carrying out the research. Based on a recent finding, we implemented different resource management policies on a validated software process model on waterfall systems development life cycle. Subsequently, we examined the efficacies of these resource management policies on project quality under requirement volatility.

Results indicate variations in quality metrics like error generation, error detection, and quality assurance effort across experimental scenarios as different patterns of requirement volatility and resource management policies impact the software project dynamics in different ways.

In absence of any imposed schedule penalty, the extent of variations in project parameters across the policy choices was not very significant. The results are also expected to differ depending upon the project development environment.

Findings are expected to assist project managers in deciding on the workforce augmentation plan that would favorably satisfy both the organization's objectives as well as the users' quality requirements under requirement volatility.

In present day context of shorter time to market and stringent quality requirements; meeting quality targets become difficult especially in scenarios where requirement volatility is a norm. This paper provides a dynamic view of the phenomenon of how quality gets affected; and explores the efficacy of different resource management strategies in improving quality under the experimental scenarios.

Today, human resource managers do not have the luxury of operating and performing in a stable, predictable environment as political, social and economic changes are affecting all organizations and their human resource management activities. In particular, the dominant environmental uncertainties combined with recent trends/changes in the socio‐economic climate are having considerable effects on the place and role of human resource planning (HRP). Outlines some of the major issues surrounding the HRP function in the face of the above uncertainties and changes. An operational HRP model designed to incorporate these is proposed and outlined. Suggestions for implementing the model by means of simple spreadsheets or a basic (object oriented) computerized decision support system are also made. A preliminary computerized decision support system, based on the proposed model, can easily be developed. This would prove of great assistance to human resource managers, planners and professionals in the challenging task of personnel planning in the 1990s. Also outlines the various scenarios and procedures required in building the operational model.

Human resource is the asset for a nation’s development and growth. The skilful human resource will enhance the nation’s productivity and directly contribute to the economy growth. At the country level, a nation’s human resource development (HRD) policy and human resource trainings schemes will catalyst for the growth of the workforce’s productivity, especially in the Industrial Revolution 4.0 which requires advanced technological knowledge and specialists in particular fields such as digitalisation, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. This chapter discusses the HRD in developed, developing and less-developed countries and raise awareness and attention of organisations as well as nations to develop and train up human resource for the future growth of the countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of human resource disclosure on corporate image.

The information about human resources presented in their annual reports by 105 Spanish listed companies was grouped in three categories, previously defined in literature. We distinguish information about human capital (items usually included as human capital in Intellectual Capital reports), social information about employees and information about ethics questions relative to employees. A content analysis of these 105 annual reports was conducted to measure human resource disclosure and a regression analysis was carried out to study the impact of this information on company image.

The findings reflect the significant effect of the three categories of human resource disclosure on corporate image.

This study might encourage firms to improve their disclosure policy on issues related to human capital, such as training, and on social and ethical aspects of employees, such as health and safety at work and working rights.

This paper contributes to research on human resources by confirming the impact not only of information about human capital, which is mainly oriented to shareholders, but of social and ethical information about employees, oriented as well as to stakeholders, on corporate reputation.

Effective human resource planning allows management to recruit, develop and deploy the right people at the right place at the right time, to meet organizational internal and external service level commitments. Firms are constantly looking out for strategies to cope with skill shortages that are particularly acute in the “knowledge intense” industries due to high staff turnover. The purpose of this paper is to describe how system dynamics modeling allows management to plan to hire and develop right level of skills and competencies in the organizational inventory to meet desired service level targets.

An integrated system dynamics framework is used to develop various feedbacks and feed forward paths in the context of competence planning and development. The model is mapped onto an overseas process industry company's recruitment and attrition situations and tested using real data.

Strategies for human resource planning are developed by conducting time‐based dynamic analysis. Optimum design guidelines are provided to reduce the unwanted scenario of competence surplus and/or shortage, and therefore, to reduce disparity in between service level needs and availability of right competencies.

System dynamics type of modeling is usually suited for medium to long range timescale (two to five years scenarios). There is a need for the model to be tested in a high turnover industry such as IT to test its efficacy in short‐term time scale, where shortage in required talent is more acute. Also this model is tested for measuring the generic skill‐sets in here. There is a need to test the model for a mixture of generic and specialized skills‐set in a specific business operation.

The authors anticipate that system dynamics modeling would help the decision makers and HR professionals to devise medium to long‐term human resource planning strategies to anticipate and meet the service level expectations from the internal and external customers.

Such planning exercise will avoid the situation of customer dissatisfaction due to right competence shortages. Also this will reduce the staff surplus scenario that usually leads to knee‐jerk reaction to lay‐off unwanted skills, which is usually a costly exercise and impacts negatively on staff morale.

Use of the systems dynamics model introduced here is a novel way to analyze human resource planning function to meet the target service level demands. The idea that an organization can estimate the service level requirements for medium to long‐term situations, and conduct what‐if scenarios in a dynamic sense, can provide valuable information in strategic planning purposes.

This monograph seeks to supply a contribution to the debate on the major formative factors which have led to current perceptions of the roles which either should be, or are, undertaken by industrial training officers. Any attempt to ascertain these developmental paths must be limited by the relative importance which the interpreter gives to writings and events. To this extent it must be a subjective and selective viewpoint. Whatever our perspective, there is one undoubted fact: there has been a considerable increase in the number of industrial training officers over the last 20 years — and a corresponding increase in training activities. This increase has been more than matched with an outpouring of literature on training and, to a much lesser extent, research into training themes.