Lean towards learning: connecting Lean Thinking and human resource management in UK higher education

From its origins in the automotive industry, Lean Thinking is increasingly being seen as a solution to problems of efficiency and quality in other industries and sectors. In recent years attempts have been made to transfer Lean principles and practice to the higher education sector with indications of mixed consequences and debate over its suitability. This paper contributes to the debate by drawing evidence from thirty-four interviews conducted across two UK universities that have implemented Lean in some of their activities and we pay particular attention to the role of the HR function in facilitating its introduction. The findings suggest there are problems in understanding, communicating and transferring Lean Thinking in the higher education context; that, despite HR systems being vital facets of Lean, HR professionals are excluded from participation; and that as a consequence the depth and breadth of Lean application in the two institutions is very limited

Balancing employee needs, project requirements and organisational priorities in team deployment

The 'people and performance' model asserts that performance is a sum of employee ability, motivation and opportunity (AMO). Despite extensive evidence of this people-performance link within manufacturing and many service sectors, studies within the construction industry are limited. Thus, a recent research project set out to explore the team deployment strategies of a large construction company with the view of establishing how a balance could be achieved between organisational strategic priorities, operational project requirements and individual employee needs and preferences. The findings suggested that project priorities often took precedence over the delivery of the strategic intentions of the organisation in meeting employees' individual needs. This approach is not sustainable in the long term because of the negative implications that such a policy had in relation to employee stress and staff turnover. It is suggested that a resourcing structure that takes into account the multiple facets of AMO may provide a more effective approach for balancing organisational strategic priorities, operational project requirements and individual employee needs and preferences more appropriately in the future

The Relationship Between HR Practices and Firm Performance: Examining Causal Order

Significant research attention has been devoted to examining the relationship between HR practices and firm performance, and the research support has assumed HR as the causal variable. Using data from 45 business units (with 62 data points), this study examines how measures of HR practices correlate with past, concurrent, and future operational performance measures. The results indicate that correlations with performance measures at all three times are both high and invariant, and that controlling for past or concurrent performance virtually eliminates the correlation of HR with future performance. Implications are discussed

Investigating the mix of strategic choices and performance of transaction platforms: Evidence from the crowdfunding setting

Research Summary: The platform literature offers keen insights on the pricing and non-pricing strategies that transaction platforms undertake. We supplement this work by studying how platforms mix together their strategic choices and the association with platforms’ performance. To that end, we focus on crowdfunding platforms; a prominent setting of transaction platforms. We present an inductive large-N study of the population of 788 crowdfunding platforms that operated in EU-15 countries up to 2018. Our contribution is threefold: (a) identifying common mixes of strategic choices; (b) tracking deviations from these mixes; and (c) associating these with platforms’ survival and growth. We discuss our findings and how they advance knowledge at the intersection of the platform and strategic management literatures. Managerial Summary: Notable transaction-platforms such as eBay, LinkedIn, and Tencent have an aggregate market-value in the hundreds of billions of dollars. We know that platforms’ success is driven by the strategic choices they undertake. Yet, we know less about how they mix together these choices and the association with platforms’ performance. Our study addresses this gap by focusing on a prominent setting: crowdfunding. Using data on the population of 788 crowdfunding platforms in EU-15 countries, we show that these platforms cluster around three common mixes of strategic choices. Moreover, crowdfunding platforms do not strictly adhere to the strategy mix they are affiliated with. Interestingly, there is a positive association between the degree to which a platform's choices differentiate from its strategy mix and platform's subsequent performance

Der Beitrag des Personalmanagements zum Unternehmenserfolg. Eine Metaanalyse nach 20 Jahren Erfolgsfaktorenforschung

Die Metaanalyse beruht auf 61 Primärstudien, die zwischen 1985 und 2003 in internationalen Zeitschriften veröffentlicht wurden und den statistischen Zusammenhang zwischen Personalmanagementmaßnahmen und dem Unternehmenserfolg untersucht haben. Die Analyse ergibt einen positiven Gesamteffekt, der aber nur für Teilgruppen signifikant ist. Aufgeschlüsselt nach Personalfunktionen sind vor allem die Effekte für den Weiterbildungsaufwand, für den Anteil variabler Vergütung und den Rekrutierungsaufwand signifikant - die beiden ersteren allerdings mit abnehmender Signifikanz im Zeitverlauf. Darüber hinaus zeichnen sich auch für die Förderung der Work Life Balance und eine Personalpolitik, die auf die Förderung des individuellen Commitment abzielt, signifikante Effekte ab. Das Ergebnis lässt sich durch ein Zusammenspiel von "First Mover"- und Institutionalisierungseffekten erklären. Die Analyse zeigt auch, dass die Ergebnisse von Erfolgsfaktorenstudien stark durch die Wahl der Erfolgsvariable, jedoch weniger durch Moderatorvariablen, wie die Unternehmensgröße oder das Untersuchungsland beeinflusst werden. Für die weitere Personalerfolgsfaktorenforschung ergibt sich die Notwendigkeit einer weitergehenden Standardisierung in der Operationalisierung der Untersuchungsvariablen.This article presents the results of a meta-analysis based on 61 studies investigating the link between human resource management practices and organisational performance which were published between 1985 and 2003 in international peer-reviewed journals. Although the analysis shows an overall positive effect, it is significant for specific HR practices only. Looking more closely at specific human resource management practices, the effect is particularly significant for efforts in recruitment and selection, investments in training and variable pay. For the last two HR practices, the effects are significant for subgroups only and become weaker during the last decade. Significant effects can be expected for the promotion of the work-life-balance, and for a human resource policy encouraging individual commitment. These effects are, however, uncertain due to the small number of studies. The main results can be explained by "firstmover"- and institutionalising effects. The meta-analysis also shows that the results of performance factor studies are strongly influenced by the choice of the performance variable, and less impacted by control variables (organisational size, country). In future research into human resource performance factors it will be necessary to standardise the operationalisation of the variables under examination

Linking Customer Interaction and Innovation: The Mediating Role of New Organizational Practices

The notion that firms can improve their innovativeness by tapping users and customers for knowledge has become prominent in innovation studies. Similar arguments have been made in the marketing literature. We argue that neither literatures take sufficient account of firm organization. Specifically, firms that attempt to leverage user and customer knowledge in the context of innovation must design an internal organization appropriate to support it. This can be achieved in particular through the use of new organizational practices, notably, intensive vertical and lateral communication, rewarding employees for sharing and acquiring knowledge, and high levels of delegation of decision rights. In this paper, six hypotheses were developed and tested on a data set of 169 Danish firms drawn from a 2001 survey of the 1,000 largest firms in Denmark. A key result is that the link from customer knowledge to innovation is completely mediated by organizational practices

Managerial Payoff and Gift Exchange in the Field

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. The results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage gift and the agent's ability to repay the gift. We collect information on ability to control for differences and on reciprocal inclination to show that gift exchange is more effective with more reciprocal agents. We present a simple principal-agent model with reciprocal subjects that motivates our empirical findings. Our results offer an avenue to reconcile the recent conflicting evidence on the efficacy of gift exchange outside the lab; we suggest that the significance of gift exchange relations depends on details of the environment

Inside Organizations: Pricing, Politics, and Path Dependence

When economists have considered organizations, much attention has focused on the boundary of the firm, rather than its internal structures and processes. In contrast, this review sketches three approaches to the economic theory of internal organization—one substantially developed, another rapidly emerging, and a third on the horizon. The first approach (pricing) applies Pigou's prescription: If markets get prices wrong, then the economist's job is to fix the prices. The second approach (politics) considers environments where important actions inside organizations simply cannot be priced, so power and control become central. Finally, the third approach (path dependence) complements the first two by shifting attention from the between variance to the within. That is, rather than asking how organizations confronting different circumstances should choose different structures and processes, the focus here is on how path dependence can cause persistent performance differences among seemingly similar enterprises

Nose to Tail: Using the Whole Employment Relationship to Link Worker Participation to Operational Performance

Although many employers continue to adopt various forms of worker participation or employee involvement, expected positive gains often fail to materialize. One explanation for the weak or altogether missing performance effects is that researchers rely on frameworks that focus almost exclusively on contingencies related to the workers themselves or to the set of tasks subject to participatory processes. This study is premised on the notion that a broader examination of the employment relationship within which a worker participation program is embedded reveals a wider array of factors impinging upon its success. I integrate labor relations theory into existing insights from the strategic human resource management literature to advance an alternative framework that additionally accounts for structures and processes above the workplace level — namely, the (potentially implicit) contract linking employees to the organization and the business strategies enacted by the latter. The resulting propositions suggest that the performance-enhancing impact of worker participation hinges on the presence of participatory or participation-supporting structures at all three levels of the employment relationship. I conclude with implications for participation research