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

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

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

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

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

Trout movement and habitat use in the upper Shavers Fork of the Cheat River, West Virginia

I quantified brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) and brown trout (Salmo trutta) movement and habitat use in a central Appalachian watershed, the upper Shavers Fork of the Cheat River over three seasons (spring/summer 2000-01, fall 2000) with telemetry. The objectives of my study were to: (1) quantify trout habitat use among seasons, and between the mainstem and Rocky Run (a major tributary), (2) quantify the effect of temperature extremes on habitat use by brook trout, (3) quantify trout movement among seasons and between the mainstem and Rocky Run, and (4) relate movement to variations in stream flow, water temperature, and access to cold water sources (CWSs). Habitat use analysis indicated that trout use a subset of available habitats in both the mainstem and Rocky Run. Specifically trout tended to occupy deeper and higher velocity habitats than expected by chance alone. Trout also tended to remain close to cover and in close proximity to extremely high velocity microhabitats. Finally, I consistently recorded colder trout focal point temperatures in the mainstem than near-by instream temperature loggers especially when instream levels were above 20° C indicating the use of mainstem CWSs (visible surface and lateral subsurface inputs through the valley alluvium, and hyporheic upwelling). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)