Talent management: Challenges of building cross-functional capability in high-performance work systems environments

Abstract

Occupational dissimilarity is a measure of the overlap in education, skills and experience across two disciplines. Though occupational dissimilarity is not directly addressed in the organization design, careers, and other literatures, it plays an important role in organizational effectiveness. Specifically, integrating tasks when occupations are dissimilar is quite difficult, which can hinder successful strategy execution.When two ormore dissimilar functions play key roles in the value-creation process (for example, R&D and sales), the risks to organizational effectiveness are particularly acute. In these cases there are no natural tendencies for individuals to develop cross-functional skills, and traditional integration approaches typically include only formal mechanisms such as general manager development and cross-functional teams. The argument is made here that organizations should more actively focus on ways to foster cross-functional skills at the individual contributor level, not just general manager level, in such cases. Examples from logistics, consumer product analytics, and services procurement/business process outsourcing are addressed. Implications for organizations operating in emerging markets with large consumer markets but underdeveloped talent markets are also explored. © 2012 Australian Human Resources Institute.