A Comparative Study on the Effectiveness of Human Resource Professionals in Pakistan and Malaysia

The aim of this empirical paper was to show the comparison between the effectiveness of Human Resource (HR) professionals and the organizational factors (namely, leadership, organizational support and reward system), based on a study on the HR professionals in two private universities – A university(AU) in Pakistan and B university(BU) in Malaysia. Both are private universities which have multi disciplinary business, technology and education related programs. Both institutions own sophisticated systems (both humans and technology). Consequently, the human resource management (HRM) practices in AU and BU could be said to be quite advanced because of this. The approach employed in this study was to gather data on the human resource professionals from the perspectives of knowledge workers (the faculty members) in the two institutions. The data was collected through survey questionnaires which were distributed to 110 AU and 150 to BU knowledge workers. However, 73 questionnaires were returned from AU (response rate 70 %) while only 66 questionnaires were obtained from BU (44 % response rate). The study shows that there was a correlation between leadership and HR effectiveness in AU (0.58) and also in BU (0.699). The correlation between organizational support and HR effectiveness was low in AU (0.49) but strong in BU (0.673). The correlation between reward system and HR effectiveness was found to be fair for both AU (0.53) and BU (0.51). For AU, the weakest predictor was organizational support (0.49) while for BU, it was the reward system (0.51).