Leveraging HRD Competencies and Roles to Improve Managers' Performance

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why some human resource development (HRD) competencies and roles are relatively more important for managers’ individual perforamnce and how these HRD competencies and roles help improve managers’ performance. With this direction of research intent, a semi-structured interview with eight HRD professionals and eight non-HRD managers in eight different companies in Taiwan. The findings suggested that Taiwanese HRD professionals help managers’ job performance mainly by dealing with training planning and training needs analysis. In order to faciliate HRD-related jobs well, having good communication skills is also of great importanace for HRD professionals. Moreover, they should be equipped with technology literacy to utilize learning technologies for carrying out training along with the application fundamental business knowledge. In terms of the role orientation, learning specialists and business partners are the two most critical roles HRD professionals play. The present study has two main contributions. First, through interviews, we reexamined the competencies and roles identified by prior empirical studies as more prevalent for HRD professionals, and discovered competencies and roles which can help managers’ performance comparativley. Second, the interview excerpts provided in-depth understadning of the targted competencies and roles as well as explained why and how these competneics and roles benefit managers’ jobs. Overall, the findings generated strong evidence-based recommendations for selection, training, development, compensation, and performance appraisals for HRD professionals in Taiwan.