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I begin by examining some ways in which organisations have attempted to improve their recruitment and selection procedures to minimise bias and unfair discrimination, and focus on the assessment centre as a potentially useful technique in this respect, especially for managerial selection. I go on to examine the assessment centre in more detail, including its origins, construction and uses, before discussing the strong evidence for its validity as a selection and assessment procedure. I then describe some recent British innovations in assessment centre design and practice, especially in its use for management and organisation development purposes, before discussing some of my own recent research, in collaboration with Ivan Robertson and Usha Rout, on participants' attitudes towards the use of assessment centres for selection and development purposes, including gender differences in attitudes.

This paper seeks to study the changing role of training and development over a seven‐year period.

Quantitative analysis; comparative analysis of 763 training and development/HRD job advertisements featured over a seven month‐period in 1996‐1997 and in 2003‐2004.

Change in the training and development role has been patchy and not as extensive as some of the literature has suggested.

The study was confined to training and development/HRD job advertisements from one, albeit leading, UK HR magazine and only allowed a seven‐year gap between the two sets of data gathered. It would have been interesting to have analysed job advertisements from multiple sources and over a longer period of time, and to have had a ten‐year gap between the two sets of data. However, the data gathering was a very time‐consuming process which limited the scope of the data gathered.

Practitioners need to consider how the training and development/HRD role is represented to the external world and the implications this has for the perceived image of the profession. Further, given the amount of resources invested in the recruitment process, those compiling job advertisements need to take care to ensure that the final product accurately reflects what is required of the post and incorporates any changes to the role over time.

First study to use training and development/HRD job advertisements to examine the ways in which the role of training and development has changed.

Assessment centres as a total system, involving theoretical, practical and technical aspects, are focused on. Recent research findings on assessment centres, their processes and practices, are discussed and the implications for practice are examined.

Most approaches to the management of equal opportunity in the “race” field in the UK have emphasised policy development and communication, gender and ethnic monitoring, and attention to developing recruitment and selection practices that ensure a more representative workforce. Race training, especially racism awareness training, has often been given a key role. Organisation development (OD) approaches have not tended to be influential, despite the origins of OD in addressing practical problems of race relations. Drawing on empirical work with assessment procedures, in particular the use of developmental assessment centres, and on work on improving collaboration between nurses and social workers so as to enable women of Asian origin to enjoy greater access to hospital social work services, it is argued that such OD approaches as teambuilding, survey feedback and targeted career development are crucial to the management of equal opportunity, and to the management of cultural change.

Managing international and domestic diversity and learning to work with difference are increasingly becoming key managerial and organizational skills. Reviews the reasons for the growth of interest in this topic, critically analyses the claims made by practitioners in this area, and draws on two case studies of organizations attempting to develop their capabilities to work successfully with difference to develop a model of the key skills involved. Outlines some strategies by which such skills and capabilities may be developed.

Most organisations attempting to implement equal opportunity with regard to race issues have concentrated on policy formulation, monitoring and training. Despite recent criticism, racism awareness training has been frequently adopted, often in isolation from developments in other human resource functions. However, strategic integration of all the HRM functions is necessary if equal opportunity objectives are to be achieved. Drawing on empirical research in assessment centres and on interorganisational collaboration, it is argued that this requires developments in recruitment, selection, training, career development, appraisal and reward functions and attention to issues of cultural change.

This article reports the findings of a systematic review of the factors promoting and obstacles hindering joint working at the NHS/social services interface. The review provides robust, research‐based evidence about different models of joint working across the interface at the strategic, commissioning and operational levels and describes the factors known to have an impact on the success of joint working.

Organisation Development (OD) seems to have become unfashionable in the UK in recent years, with “culture and excellence” and “strategic human resources management” approaches more popular. This is in part due to OD’s naivete over power and politics, its neglect of corporate‐level issues in favour of personal, interpersonal and group issues, and its neglect of the environment in which the organisation is located. However, within OD there has been a continuing focus on mission, strategy and excellence, and on leadership, culture and excellence. Curiously, however, the authors of literature in those areas are not cited in the works of the “excellence” school. An effective approach to managing organisational change requires a perspective that integrates both “mission and strategy” and “personal and team development” approaches. Drawing on work in British Telecom, it is proposed that a focus on individual skills assessment and development, such as that generated by developmental assessment centres, is also required.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the identification of barriers to the implementation of benchmarking initiatives. Managers have little guidance on strategies for successful implementation and face difficulties in anticipating problems. The main objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of typical barriers that occur in a specific type of benchmarking: internal benchmarking.

This paper systematically develops a categorized list of barriers to internal benchmarking based on the literature; and validates and enriches them with an in‐depth case study of an internal benchmarking initiative.

Barriers to internal benchmarking initiatives of different types are found: organizational barriers (people, culture, and context), benchmarking project management barriers (planning and implementation, leadership, and business pressures) and benchmarking data barriers (difficulty to access/compare data). Future studies might take these categories as a solid starting point in furthering the understanding of barriers to benchmarking.

The exploratory nature of the paper limits its generalizability.

The paper paves the way for the process of devising strategies to overcome the identified barriers. This is especially relevant because few studies to date have focused on these issues and benchmarking practitioners have insufficient knowledge to anticipate and overcome benchmarking‐related problems.

This paper contributes to theory building on the implementation of benchmarking in general; and on barriers to internal benchmarking initiatives in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between service innovation, customer value creation (CVC) and customer satisfaction (CS) with specific emphasis to Ghanaian telecommunication operators.

Assuming a positivist philosophical approach with a quantitative data analysis technique, the study samples 510 registered adult customers of at least one telecommunication network in Ghana. An exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to assess and confirm the proposed scales validity and the relationships of the research model.

The study unveiled that a service firm’s ability to achieve CS is dependent on how telecommunication operators harness and deploy their service innovation activities. In addition, the study showed that CVC mediates the relationship between service innovation and CS. Thus, service innovation must create value for customers in order to enhance CS.

By relating the study findings to firms’ innovation strategies, managers can improve the strength of their service offerings to achieve CS by spending more on consumer research, market research and increased customer interactions.

Considering the uniqueness of this study in a Ghanaian context, the research draws on two influential theories, which are signaling theory and expectation disconfirmation theory to examine the differential role played by service innovation in enabling telecommunication operators in Ghana, to create customer value in order to achieve CS amidst the constraints in the business environment.