Human Resource Management in Telecommunication Sector: A Comparative Study between Public and Private Mobile Company in Bangladesh

Abstract

Human Resource Management (HRM) practices have a great role in employees’ job satisfaction and organizational performance. Highly satisfied and efficient employees are the potential resources for organization since they are more productive compared with the employees who are less satisfied and less developed. This study has analyzed and compared the HRM practices in telecommunication industry of Bangladesh and has taken a state owned mobile operator-Teletalk Bangladesh Limited and a foreign owned operator-Robi Axiata Limited as the areas of study. Three core areas of HRM practices are taken for analyses which include compensation administration, training and human resource development, and maintenance functions. The major objective of the study is to assess the effectiveness of HRM practices in terms of employee satisfaction and organizational output maximization with comparative discussion between Teletalk and Robi. Number of mobile subscribers and market share of operators are considered here as the organizational outputs. A total of 50 employees, 25 from Teletalk and 25 from Robi, were taken as sample respondents to conduct a survey with structured questionnaire. Besides, two interviews were completed with HR Managers to get detail and in-depth information about the HRM practices in the two organizations. An extensive review of literatures, documents, newspapers and webpages pertained to the mobile industry, HRM and job satisfaction was conducted. The collected data was organized and analyzed in a systematic way using statistical software-SPSS. The data and findings were presented with detail analysis and explanation in order to address research question and fulfill the objectives.

From the analysis it has been found that there are some differences in HR practices and their influences on job satisfaction among the employees in the studied two mobile operators. In most of the cases of HRM practices, private mobile operator- Robi is found effective in terms of both employee satisfaction and output maximization i.e. grabbing the new subscribers and market share. On the other hand, in public operator- Teletalk, almost all HRM practices are less effective compared with Robi in promoting job satisfaction of employees as well as organizational outputs. Only salary and job security are found satisfactory in Teletalk. The study findings clearly show the significant linkage between HR practices and job satisfaction. In addition, the results also indicate that satisfied and developed employees can contribute towards organizational performance and output maximization. Finally, the study has made a conclusion that HRM practices in private mobile operator (Robi) in more effective compared with the state owned mobile company (Teletalk) in terms of both employee and organizational perspective.