Human resources development practices as a key tool to attract, motivate and retain knowledge workers

Abstract

Management literature maintains that knowledge workers represent a very specific type of the workforce. Therefore for knowledge-intensive firms that are built mainly on employment of knowledge workers the knowledge management and human resources management tasks merge into one challenging issue. We discuss characteristics of knowledge workers and specific challenges in managing them and present how these peculiarities transform the practices of the human resources management. Based on this analysis we suggest a number of human resources development practices as being, in our view, especially relevant for knowledge workers and able to make a significant contribution to the efficiency both of the knowledge workers and of the company in whole. Further we demonstrate that these human resources development practices may also contribute positively to some other crucial aspects of the knowledge management - namely, knowledge sharing and absorptive capacity development. As a conclusion, we formulate the directions and hypotheses for the future empirical research.