PREDICTION OF THE CHANGE IN NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES IN SERBIAN COMPANIES BASED ON CONTINGENCY AND QUALITY MANAGEMENT FACTORS

Abstract

A company’s development performance and growth may be impacted by a wide range of different factors, which unquestionably affect number of the employees in the loop. Taking into account all influencing factors, companies would benefit if have possibility to predict the degree of change in the number of employees in future period in order to adjust their internal strategy or to make appropriate decisions that enable the survival and progress of the company in the market. The aim of this research is to predict the change in number of employees based on current state of contingency and quality management factors, using information obtained from a survey of 67 different companies from Serbia. In the first part of the research, a correlation analysis is used with the aim to identify the specific contingency and quality management factors that are most closely associated to the subject of interest, which is, in this case, degree of change in the number of employes. The second part of the research involves feedforward neural network training for prediction of the degree of change in number of employees based on feature extraction of main factors. The training accuracy that proposed network achieved is 77.36%, while testing accuracy amounts 71.43%.