MRN
30,2
84
Management Research News
Vol. 30 No. 2, 2007
pp. 84-99
# Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0140-9174
DOI 10.1108/01409170710722937
Assignment of employees to
workplaces under consideration
of employee competences
and preferences
Malte L. Peters and Stephan Zelewski
Institute of Production and Industrial Information Management,
University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitaetsstr, Essen, Germany
Abstract
Purpose – This paper seeks to develop a model for the assignment of employees to workplaces.
Assignment methods are of high relevance in practice because employees should be assigned to
workplaces according to their competences and preferences to ensure that motivated employees carry
out tasks effectively and efficiently.
Design/methodology/approach – Two goal programming models are introduced with inputs and
valuations using the analytic hierarchy process.
Findings – The two goal programming models for the assignment of employees to workplaces,
which take into account both employee competences and preferences as well as workplace
competence requirements and attributes, seem to be effective in helping to arrive at an optimal
assignment decision.
Research limitations/implications – In practice, one major problem is that the input data for the
goal programming models are not updated regularly. Thus, the documentation of the competence
profiles and the preferences of the employees might be out of date or incomplete.
Originality/value – The development of the two goal programming models which could be applied
immediately in practical competence management is what makes the work valuable and addresses a
gap in the modelling of personnel assignment methodologies.
Keywords Competences, Skills, Workplace, Employee attitudes, Analytical hierarchy process,
Programming
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Much research has been done on the documentation and inquiry of competences. Much
effort has been devoted to the conceptualization of ontologies with the aim to overcome
linguistic divergences between semantically equivalent information from different
sources ( Hefke and Stojanovic, 2004; Lau and Sure, 2002; Sure et al., 2000) and the
computer-based automatic inquiry of competences using non-deductive inference rules
(Dittmann and Zelewski, 2004). In practice, several software systems have been
developed that offer functions dedicated to the documentation of competences
(Primavera Systems, Inc., 2006; SAP AG, 2006). Such software systems enable the user
to find employees with specified competences quickly. But the competence-based
assignment of these employees to workplaces is not supported by any commercially
available software system. Also, relatively little research has been done on this topic
( Peters and Zelewski, 2005). However, the assignment of employees to workplaces can
lead to ineffective and inefficient job performance for several reasons. On the one hand,
employees probably might not satisfy the competence requirements associated with
the workplaces to which they have been assigned and, as a result, they cannot cope
with workplace strains. Employees should therefore be assigned to workplaces
according to their competences to ensure effective and efficient job performance. On the
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