ایجاد مدیریت استعداد برای جانشینی برنامه ریزی شرکت از طریق فرایند تحلیل شبکه ای : برنامه برای یک شرکت نیمه هادی MNC در تایوان

This study is to design a leadership development program for a company’s succession planning which will be important for its future competition. A semiconductor assembly and testing multinational corporation (MNC) in Taiwan was selected for interviews of its high level management to address the business strategy and challenge. Along with an investigation of the literature, this research works on the experiences and leadership competencies needed for those in leadership positions. The major consideration on designing leadership development program is to deal with many intangible factors, as well as dependent relationship among experiences and leadership competencies. Then ANP approach is applied to overcome both difficulties through pairwise comparisons by experts. A weight system of experiences and leadership competencies is then built for designing the leadership development program, as well as the decision basis of leadership selection. This model was approved by top management at the case company and being implemented to prove its validity.

Succession planning has the potential to become one of the major business disciplines in the coming decade. According to the most recent Conference Board CEO challenge–a global survey of more than 500 CEOs–talent-related issues continue to be one of the greatest concerns for business leaders [1]. Simultaneously, based on human resources and business plans, managing succession is a very critical long-term human resource (HR) management issue. Succession planning has been defined in numerous ways over the years. In general, it is classified as the deliberate and systematic efforts to project leadership requirements, to identify a pool of high potential candidates, and to develop leadership competencies in those candidates through intentional learning experiences and selections of leaders from a pool of potential leaders [2]. Consequently, good succession planning does not just look at who is next in the line for a slot, but also targets people early in their careers and determines what kind of training and experiences they need in order to become effective leaders. The purpose of this study is to design a leadership development program for developing a company’s future potentials as well as an assessment of development can be an important reference to decide or select who will be the successor of an important leadership position. Leadership development programs include both experiences and leadership competencies which project what the company’s needs are, and they design a ranking importance of those needs. Put into practice, the main factors to measure the success of leader development is good performance of those who have been promoted or taken up a new assignment to succeed a leadership position. Collins indicates that outcomes of leadership development programs are defined in terms of organizational performance [3]. Therefore, performance is the priority to be considered for designing leadership development program. This study has employed interviews with high level management and investigates research papers in the literature to work out the needed experiences and leadership competencies for leadership position holders. The study then implements the analytic network process (ANP) approach to evaluate the priorities as a basis for designing leadership development program. Rather than the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach, the ANP is applied herein to prioritize the importance of needed experiences and leadership competencies under the complex situation of interdependence and inner dependence among experiences and leadership competencies. This will be discussed further in the coming section.

This study has applied the ANP approach to design a leadership development program, as well as for selecting the successor for a leadership position. A leadership development program is the key to effective succession planning, which defines capabilities and enables organizations to close the gap between strategic intent and current performance by guiding learning and pushing development for identified potentials. The advantage of this model is that the ANP approach constructs a multi-criteria decision model for weighing the importance of experiences and leadership competencies due to its ability to overcome the complex situation of the interdependencies between the former and the latter, and any inner dependence within themselves. The analysis using ANP is relatively cumbersome as the present work requires 83 pairwise comparison matrices. To arrive at the relationship among enablers requires a long and exhaustive discussion with management team members from the case company. The top management of the case company then approved to apply this systematic approach for designing their leadership development program and proved the workability of this model at the case company. The proposed ANP model mainly focuses on linear hierarchy, but the network relationship herein is regardless of the feedback process from sub-criteria (leadership competencies) back to criteria (experiences) in the proposed model. If the alternative set (candidates for a leadership position) is added in the review loop, the model will include a feedback system between criteria and sub-criteria, criteria and alternatives, and sub-criteria and alternatives. This work will formulate a complete decision making process for leadership position holder selection. It is expected that the model will be much more complex and sizable than that used in this study. Therefore, one may utilize a two-phase decision making process [27] to effectively manage real world problems. It is expected as well that top management can make better decisions for leadership position holder selection.