Human resource management in Colombia: Level of development of the function and its practices

Abstract

Human resource management is a high strategic field for the success of companies because human beings are ultimately their driving social force. The purpose of this article was to answer two questions: Does the human resource management achieve a strategic role in the Colombian companies? How is the development level of the functional practices of human talent in Colombian organizations? To answer these questions, inferential statistical techniques were used to analyze a system of scores around two major variables: the strategic role of human management and functional practices. Comparisons of variables by size, sector, and type of company were applied. A survey was applied to 465 companies distributed in 29 departments of the country. The results classify the organizations in three levels of development: low, medium, high, and differences were found in the scores obtained by company size. The contribution of the work is in theoretical perspective assumed to visualize the strategic function of human management and its monitoring in Colombia, since in the literature there is no updated contribution on the topics presented.