Personal, professional and managerial characteristics of human resource managers: Their relationship to career development and performance

Human resources are the most essential yet critical assets an organization has. They are considered as the lifeblood of the organization in which other resources like money, machines, market and methods can be acquired and utilized. Be that as it may, these resources nevertheless may also be the cause of its failure. Hence, proper management and development of human resources should be a prime concern of any organization. The development of an organization's workforce and the management crew is an important input, if the organization's mission and target objectives are to be achieved. The focus of this study was composed of two (2) groups namely the human resource managers particularly those officials holding a plantilla position of Human Resource Officers I-IV and/or Administrative Officer for regional offices which do not have Human Resource Officers and some randomly selected employees of said agencies. Complete enumeration was employed to select the human resource manager-respondents while employee-respondents were randomly selected. The samples were determined through the use of the Slovin's formula. However, out of the 367 computed samples, there were 3 unretrieved questionnaires from DENR, thus, making the number of samples decreased to 364. The researcher utilized the descriptive correlational research method. According to Tuckman as cited by Catane (2002), correlational research is concerned with determining the degree of relationship that exists between two or more variables. It this study, it determined the relationship of the independent variables which include the characteristics of human resource managers along personal, professional and administrative to the dependent variables as indicated by their career development and performance. This study revealed that personal characteristics of human resource managers which include age, sex, civil status, ethnicity, religion and number of dependents are not significantly related to their career development measured in terms of their number of positions held, frequency of promotions and job shifts and their professional characteristics, educational attainment is significantly related to their career development particularly to their number of positions held and frequency of promotions but not significantly related to job shifts. All other variables like eligibility, number of trainings/seminars and membership to professional organizations are not significantly related to their career development. As regards their managerial characteristics, length of service and span of control were found out to have a significant relationship to their number of positions held and frequency of promotions but no significant relationship to job shifts. Length of service as HRMO, however, is not significantly related to their career development. As reflected from the findings of the study, the researcher strongly recommended that government agencies should give more weight to the educational preparation and field of specialization in the qualifications of HRMO positions and should be adopted as their institutional policy for selection and promotion for Human Resource Officer positions.