Dynamic Organizations: Achieving Marketplace Agility Through Workforce Scalability

Dynamic organizations (DOs) operate in business environments characterized by frequent and discontinuous change, They compete on the basis of marketplace agility; that is on their ability to generate a steady stream of both large and small innovations in products, services, solutions, business models, and even internal processes that enable them to leapfrog and outmaneuver current and would-be competitors and thus eke out a series of temporary competitive advantages that might, with luck, add up to sustained success over time. Marketplace agility requires the ongoing reallocation of resources, including human resources. We use the term workforce scalability to capture the capacity of an organization to keep its human resources aligned with business needs by transitioning quickly and easily from one human resource configuration to another and another, ad infinitum. We argue that marketplace agility is enhanced by workforce agility because it is likely to meet the four necessary and sufficient conditions postulated by the resource based view (RBV) of the firm – valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable – if it can be attained. Our analysis therefore concludes by focusing on the two dimensions of workforce scalability – alignment and fluidity – and postulating a number of principles that might be used to guide the design of an HR strategy that enhances both. Throughout the paper, key concepts are illustrated using the experiences of Google, the well-known Internet search firm. Because the analysis is speculative and intended primarily to pique the interest of researchers and practitioners, the paper ends with a number of important questions that remain to be clarified

Achieving Marketplace Agility Through Human Resource Scalability

[Excerpt] Increasingly, firms find themselves, either by circumstances or choice, operating in highly turbulent business environments. For them, competitiveness is a constantly moving target. Many, it appears, are satisfied to enjoin the struggle with patched up business models and warmed over bureaucracies. But some, convinced that this is a losing proposition, are aggressively exploring and even experimenting with alternative frameworks and approaches. The monikers are many -- kinetic (Fradette and Michaud, 1998), dynamic (Peterson and Mannix, 2003), resilient (Hamel and Valikangas, 2003) and our favorite, agile (Shafer, Dyer, Kilty, Ericksen and Amos, 2001) -- but the aim is the same: to create organizations where change is the natural state of affairs. Clearly, this quest poses a number of major challenges for our field (Dyer and Shafer, 1999, 2003), one of which, optimizing human resource scalability, is the subject of this essay

Due Process for Non-Union Employees: The Influence of System Characteristics on Fairness Perceptions

This paper examines fairness perceptions associated with non-union complaint systems. Collaborating with seven CAHRS sponsors, we analyzed data collected from 450 non-union,non-management employees. We find that non-union complaint systems that are regarded as credible, accessible and safe (i.e., no retaliation) influence perceptions of fairness which, in turn, influence the likelihood to use the system. Implications are drawn for practice and research

ILR Impact Brief - Workforce Alignment and Fluidity May Yield a Competitive Advantage

[Excerpt] The authors postulate that workforce scalability is the key competency necessary for ongoing marketplace success. Workforce scalability encompasses two factors: alignment and fluidity. The former is an ideal target that calls for the right number of the right type of people in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. The latter is the means by which organizations hit the target, and specifically refers to the speed and ease with which employees are moved around and adjust their behaviors to suit changing business requirements. A set of operating principles facilitates the simultaneous attainment of workforce alignment and fluidity

Workplace 2000: A Delphi-Study

[Excerpt] Prognosticate and one thing is certain: you are likely to be wrong. Then why speculate about Workplace 20001 Because Boulding is right; as the future unfolds, surprise is preferable to astonishment. Informed speculation enhances anticipation and understanding, the bases of informed decision-making. It produces a vision with which to agree or disagree, and the means to ascertain why. If the vision proves disagreeable, there is a baseline from which to plot a preferred scenario. For in the end, Workplace 2000 will emerge not from prediction, but from choice

Uncovering And Exploring The Mobilization And Launch Phase Of High And Low Performing Project Teams

As part of a larger study, this analysis, first, uncovers a previously alluded to, but heretofore un-explicated, phase of project team development (PTD) -- dubbed mobilization and launch -- and, then, explores the ways in which activities and outputs of this phase relate to project team effectiveness (PTE) by comparing them across three high and three low performing teams. The analysis shows that the former used this formative period: (1) to actuate a comprehensive mobilization strategy that was carried out relatively rapidly and resulted in well informed, as well as fully and competently staffed, teams and (2) to hold highly participatory launch meetings from which team members emerged in general agreement about what needed to be done and how and by whom it would be done. Low performing teams, in contrast, basically squandered this potentially valuable time and, thus, emerged from this phase totally unprepared to move to and effectively through subsequent phases of PTD

Toward a Strategic Human Resource Management Model of High Reliability Organization Performance

In this article, we extend strategic human resource management (SHRM) thinking to theory and research on high reliability organizations (HROs) using a behavioral approach. After considering the viability of reliability as an organizational performance indicator, we identify a set of eight reliability-oriented employee behaviors (ROEBs) likely to foster organizational reliability and suggest that they are especially valuable to reliability seeking organizations that operate under “trying conditions”. We then develop a reliability-enhancing human resource strategy (REHRS) likely to facilitate the manifestation of these ROEBs. We conclude that the behavioral approach offers SHRM scholars an opportunity to explain how people contribute to specific organizational goals in specific contexts and, in turn, to identify human resource strategies that extend the general high performance human resource strategy (HPHRS) in new and important ways

Dynamic Organizations: Achieving Marketplace and Organizational Agility with People

Driven by dynamic competitive conditions, an increasing number of firms are experimenting with new, and what they hope will be, more dynamic organizational forms. This development has opened up exciting theoretical and empirical venues for students of leadership, business strategy, organizational theory, and the like. One domain that has yet to catch the wave, however, is strategic human resource management (SHRM). In an effort to catch up, we here draw on the dynamic organization (DO) and human resource strategy (HRS) literatures to delineate both a process for uncovering and the key features of a carefully crafted HRS for DOs. The logic is as follows. DOs compete through marketplace agility. Marketplace agility requires that employees at all levels engage in proactive, adaptive, and generative behaviors, bolstered by a supportive mindset. Under the right conditions, the essential mindset and behaviors, although highly dynamic, are fostered by a HRS centered on a relatively small number of dialectical, yet paradoxically stable, guiding principles and anchored in a supportive organizational infrastructure. This line of reasoning, however, rests on a rather modest empirical base and, thus, is offered less as a definitive statement than as a spur for much needed additional research

Personnel and Human Resource Management

The basic endeavor of this discipline has not changed over the years: it has sought “to contribute to organizational success by assuring that the right numbers of the right people are in the right places at the right times doing the right things in the right ways.

A Role-Based Taxonomy of Human Resource Organizations

[Excerpt] An empirically-derived classification (taxonomy) of human resource departments , based on a few fundamental roles played in organizations, was developed as an alternative to the mostly speculative existing typologies. Four types emerged: the strategic partner, the strategic advisor, the operational partner, and the operational administrator. The stability of the solution and the relationships with variables not used to generate it were found satisfactory. The types show some similarities with those identified in the literature