Capturing Variability within Organizations in the Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) Research

Time 1 - 2 pm

Join us for our free lunchtime seminar series. Read a little about Dr Pak's research below.

Traditionally, the SHRM research pertained to organizational-level phenomena. In doing so, studies could determine whether the adoption of a certain HRM system enables firms to improve operational efficiency, and outperform their counterparts. To date, the research on this theme has produced rather mixed results. At this juncture, a new stream of research has emerged. It is suggested that measuring effects of espoused, or intended, HRM systems on organizational performance may potentially be deceptive because, in reality, HR practices that are actually enacted within the organization often take different forms. And, Individual employees who attach different meanings to their own HR experiences only make the matter more complicated. In response to such concern, there has been a burgeoning interest in exploring the influence of actual or perceived HR practices in establishing the HRM-performance relationship. Here, my research begins. I noticed that SHRM studies that investigate within-organization issues still treat HRM systems as independent variables. Thus, the question of why such discrepancy exists is not often factored into their empirical models. At the organizational level, HRM systems as predictors, and as a matter of adoption, had a unique value. But, as the SHRM literature now shifts its attention to the implementation stage, examining why such variability arises becomes a meaningful extension. It implies investigation of antecedents to HRM systems within organizations. By doing so, I can directly determine factors that contribute to the implementation effectiveness of HR practices and articulate further the process through which strategically adopted HR practices are translated into expected outcomes. In this research seminar, I will introduce my recent works on this theme, one of which considers realized high-performance work systems (HPWS) a dependent variable in the model and, thus, places sources of variability within organizations at the center of inquiry.