This thesis aims to empirically examine the impact of investing in human capital development on organisational performance. It examines the relevant literature on human resource accounting and human capital development from different methodological strands and synthesises its findings in the development of a new theoretical framework. The literature review points out the challenges that remain to enterprises in quantifying and measuring the benefits of human capital development. The proposed framework takes into account those conceptual aspects of human resource accounting that how investment in human capital development can be measured to investigate the financial returns for organisations. The said framework also considers various contextual contingent factors that lead to a higher level of human resource sophistication and consequently which could affect the organisational performance. On the basis of relationships predicated between the key constructs of the theoretical model, a list of hypotheses is developed. The research methodology adopted by the researcher is based on the ideology of objectivism. It adopts a functionalist paradigm and a set of philosophical assumptions related to realism, positivism, determinism and nomotheticism. Its approach is deductive in terms of theory testing, employs the survey as its primary research strategy and uses mainly quantitative and partially qualitative methods of data collection. It adopts a cross-sectional time horizon and seeks to be exploratory and explanatory in nature. The main sample is comprised of 320 leading manufacturing organisations in Pakistan. A self-administered questionnaire is designed to collect data from human resource managers or individuals dealing with human resource development within the Pakistani manufacturing enterprises. SPSS-19 and SmartPLS packages are employed to analyse the quantitative data. Partial least squares method of structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is adopted for the testing of hypotheses. The study’s quantitative results provide an evidence of association between investment in the development of human capital and the benefits to organisations. Furthermore, organisations that invest in training and development programmes have high employee productivity which ultimately contributes towards high organisational performance. The qualitative results help in identifying the major problems faced by management of the Pakistani manufacturing organisation in evaluating investments in HCD and their impact on organisational performance. This research is a pioneer work in Pakistan and thereby contributes to the existing global literature on management accounting in general and on human resource accounting in particular.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:655751 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Iqbal, Naveed |
| Publisher | University of Bedfordshire |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10547/556940 |
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