Lorena Para

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Is human capital important in the EFQM model?
Human resources are continually called to be one of the main sources of competitive advantage of companies. At the moment, every organization looking for success must achieve its employees feeling motivated and integrated in it, understanding the processes that take place in it, comprehending them and participating actively in the ensuing objectives. Human resource management could be understood as the global control that the company implements, through the application of personnel techniques, with the objective of achieving the optimization of the results of the company (economical and human). Consequently, it is not strange to design an organization as competitive as possible, through an adequate management of human resources, trying to lead a continual improvement based, among other practices, in teamwork and satisfaction of the employees. This should improve the total quality management of the involved organizations. This has been noted for the Quality Awards (Deming, MalcomBaldrige and EFQM Prizes), which have incorporated personnel management as one of the crucial aspect to follow. In the case of the EFQM model, human resources are included on the “People criterion”. EFQM Model emphasizes the importance of specific practices:  the selection and management of the professional career, training and development, teamwork, performance appraisal, communication and personnel compensation.
The market situation obliges companies from developed economies to compete by adding new value to their current operations, generating new products or products of higher quality. In such competitive environments, human resources and human resource management plays key role in enhancing a firm’s competitive advantage.
This presentation provides evidence on the positive performance effects of people criteria’s EFQM model. The evidence shows that human capital value and uniqueness create a competitive advantage for the firm, increasing the organizational results.
That is, managers can trust in the principles on human resource management of the EFQM model, since they contribute to get better results. Our results show a positive relation among personnel management and organizational results and confirm the hypothesis of the importance that the implementation, management and development of the complete potential of employees have, in order to achieve a competitive advantage.
Evidence has been found that allows confirmation of the important role of personnel for each organization. It is reaffirmed that a series of Human Resources practices could be considered excellent for every organization, in coherence with several investigations that show that a high application of the principles included in the “people criteria” of the EFQM Model increases the motivation and satisfaction of the employees and the results in the persons.
We find also consistent support for the conclusion that human capital value and uniqueness play a mediation role in the relationship between people criterion in the EFQM model and performance of the organization. The business support role for the human resource function is improving the performance of the organization by improving managerial behavior about human capital management.
Organizations that are designed to gain a competitive advantage by their ability to have their human capital perform in ways that differentiate them need to have this human capital organized and led, trained and developed in ways that lead to the development of the right core competencies and organizational capabilities. It means designing every organizational system with an eye to attracting, developing, retaining and motivating the best people.
Future research should study in depth the relations proposed in the EFQM model in relation with total quality models, especially on the human resource topics. For instance, it would be interesting to compare which human resource management practices are derived from EFQM and TQM or, even, on the ISO norms.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Lorena Para is a PhD student at Business Management Department of Polytechnic University of Cartagena, Spain.