Abstract:

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 - University of Management and Technology (UMT) in Pakistan and the Multimedia University (MMU) 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).  Human resource management (HRM) in UMT and MMU would be expected to be far more advanced when compared to the other universities in Pakistan and Malaysia. The approach employed 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 UMT and 150 to MMU knowledge workers.  However, 73 questionnaires were returned from UMT (response rate 70 %) while only 66 questionnaires were obtained from MMU (44 % response rate).  The study shows that there was a correlation between leadership and HR effectiveness in UMT (0.58) and also in MMU (0.699).  The correlation between organizational support and HR effectiveness was low in UMT (0.49) but strong in MMU (0.673). The correlation between reward system and HR effectiveness was found to be fair for both UMT (0.53) and MMU (0.51). For UMT, the weakest predictor was organizational support (0.49) while for MMU, it was the reward system (0.51).