Role is just a set of expectations ..

This is my 28th year in HR” says Vasanthi Srinivasan, Assistant Professor, Organisation Behaviour and HRM, IIM-B with an elegant smile on her face. She was addressing the students of HR Varsity in CBS.

The interactive session began with a question posed to her from a student with respect to the academic knowledge and its application in the organizational environment. She replied by describing her first job experience and took us through compensation benchmarking exercise – the real aspect of it. This triggered more questions from the students and the session led to a discussion on compensation benchmarking process.

We also learnt the way to differentiate role and task. The learning that “Role is nothing more than a set of expectations” cannot be forgotten at any moment in our life.

She has done abundant research, published papers and her research on Competency Management helped her to highlight the three frames of competencies for HR professionals. She threw light on “unstated assumptions in Variable Pay” which would be kept in mind when we need to design compensation structure for our organizations. It was an enlightening session that made us realize the strategic importance of this function.