Assessment of Human Capital Management, Organizational Climate, Commitment and Performance in Latin America

The purpose of the research was to confirm the validity of an analytical model originally proposed by
Kopelman, Brief and Guzzo [1] in 4 countries of the Latin American region. Cincel, a top
organizational research institution from Colombia, adapted the original model and coordinated this
research. The objectives of the research included to make various comparisons and relationships
among some productive sectors and countries of the region. Cincel’s analytical model implies that the
Human Capital Management Practices (HCMP) can predict the Perceived Organizational
Performance (POP), but also that this relationship is moderated by the variables Organizational
Climate (OC) and, at minimum, 3 types of commitment of the staff: Affective Commitment (AC),
Continuity Commitment (CC) and Normative Commitment (NC). The research includes a total sample
of 4491 participants from Chile (CL), N = 799, Colombia (CO), N = 2083, Mexico (MX), N = 874, and
the Dominican Republic (DO), N = 735. The productive sectors included were Industry, Services and
Education. The instruments for the data gathering were supplied by Cincel. The questionnaires were
administered via Internet by Cincel. The moderation analysis was done with the regression procedure
of the SPSS. In general, the moderation analysis validated the model, with important differences for
the included sectors. HCMP and OC were effective in predicting POP in every sector. AC was a good
predictor of POP in the Services and Education sectors, while CC could only predict POP in the
Education sector and the NC was a good predictor of POP only in the Industry sector. The interaction
between OC and CN was able to predict POP in both the Industry and Services sectors. Furthermore,
we found significant differences, confirmed by analysis of variances (ANOVA), among the evaluations
in the different countries. CO performed better in the evaluations in almost every factor for each
sector. DO was second in the evaluations of the Industry and Services sectors. MX was second in the
Education sector, and CL was third in the Services sector. The human capital managers from each
country should take in account the fact that the predictors of performance and the staff commitment
are different for each country and for the different productive sectors. More research is needed to
determine the reasons for these idiosyncratic differences among the countries. The other main
contribution of this research was to establish the fact that the importance of the different factors was
very diverse for each participant country. Human Capital managers should verify in each country the
importance of the factors affecting performance to maximize their effectivity.