Title: Determination of recruitment age in Markov manpower systems

Authors: K. Nilakantan, B.G. Raghavendra

Addresses: Institute of Management Technology, 603, Khullar Apartments, Byramji Town, Nagpur-440013, India. ' Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore-560012, India

Abstract: The chronological age of members in an organisation has been found to be one of the determinants of their effectiveness, efficiency and performance, and organisational planners find it advantageous to monitor the age distributions in the hierarchical grades of the organisation, to maintain homogeneity and proper flow of personnel up the hierarchy. In this paper, methods have been devised to maintain specified age distributions for hierarchical systems in general, and also for a class of hierarchical organisations which follow |proportionality| policies. Proportionality policies are those that restrict the recruitment to every level of the hierarchy to be in proportion to the promotions into that level, and are of relevance to organisations which outsource a part of their work, the outsourced workforce being notionally viewed as recruits to the system, and also to those which ostensibly aim to protect the career interests of their existing employees through such policies. The required or specified age characteristics are maintained by selecting recruits of the appropriate ages to the system. The theoretical analyses have been illustrated with numerical examples, and validated with real-world data. The results extend in an identical and simple manner to aggregate tenure distributions also.

Keywords: manpower planning; Markov models; manpower systems; age distribution; recruitment age.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMS.2011.037709

International Journal of Applied Management Science, 2011 Vol.3 No.1, pp.72 - 96

Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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