Human Resource or Working on High Performance - Case Study Example

Name Course Tutor Date Introduction In the recent past, there have been significant researches and studies investigating the link between human resource management and organizational performance. The studies have put concerted efforts on the high commitment as a best practice in human resource management.as such the extent to which commitment in HRM affects the performance of the organization has been under scrutiny. The scope was initially stimulated by a number of studies in the United States but it has since spread to other countries like Britain. Basically, high commitment HRM focuses on practices that maximize the productivity of personnel, improved attitudes, higher building of potential, lower turnover and absenteeism accompanied by improved consumer service and satisfaction. Since the practice of high commitment HRM seems to have a positive impact both for organizations and employees it ought to be recommended and practiced in all organizations that have profit and wealth maximization goals. However, this is not the case as studies have come to realize. Among the studies conducted by different researchers, some have found out that not all best practices In HRM can be linked to better organizational performance (Redman and Wilkinson 4). The practices that constitute high commitment and performance have been doubted. The emerging issues in the practices revolve around their synergy and ability to work together to reach set goals. The practices have also been questioned in terms of attractiveness to employees and employers as well. Though organizational performance can be linked to high commitment HRM there are underpinning factors that processes depend on to make the application and causality. “High commitment HRM or high performance working is so good for organizations performance that only a minority of UK organizations choose to adopt such an approach” This statement supports the claim that high performance HRM , though good for positive organizational performance, is not popularly applied in the united kingdom for a number of reasons. The reason for this is that the practice is associated with problems of direction and causality as mentioned earlier. In this essay, a critical evaluation for the reason why the practice is not common in the United Kingdom and why organizations avoid it will be evaluated. Several reasons have been cited about the applicability of high performance working. These reasons have made organizations in the UK to shy away from the practices or engage them in partly but not fully in this case, there are few organizations in the UK that implement it fully in their human resource strategies the commission for skills and employment in the UK was launched in 2008 to raise the opportunities for employers and employees in government and in the private sector towards improving productivity in the country and make it a leader in world class human resource productivity and performance (de Waal 8). Definition of high work performance and extent of application Different organizations define the concept differently and hence its application varies in different organizations. It is sometimes referred as high involvement management, high commitment management or high performance working system. Whichever the definition that organizations have of the concept, its ideology is based on a set of human resource management practices that have the potential to bring out the best performance from employees in an organization, hence increasing productivity and performance. Different organizations are based on different cultures and therefore their human resource practices are different. The approaches used are diverse for different industries and hence using the practice in an all inclusive manner hinders the inclusion of organizations that have unique organizational cultures based on their human resource portfolios. The proxies developed for high performance practices are also not applicable for some organizations. For instance, the practice advocates for constant employee training which may be inapplicable for small organizations which would prefer hiring new employees who are already trained as opposed to training the existing ones. Organizations also use different measure to gauge their performance. There are those that are profit oriented and use this to measure their performance (Marchington and Wil 71). Non profit making organizations would have it otherwise by looking at achievement of their goals. In this case, application of high performance human resource management practices may hinder the achievement of social goals that they intend to. Though most organizations measure performance through profitability, they may achieve this without practicing high work performance systems. Application would mean a reduction in profitability which is the reason why organizations would abandon it all together. The application of high commitment management may note relevant in some sectors in the UK. For instance, government sectors may not apply it as much as the private sector. This is also driven by goal diversity and applicability of the same in different sectors. Technology adoption problem and high commitment HRM the implementation of high commitment HRM practices in an organization entails a string of decision that organizational leaders and management have to undertake. Organizations are not set or founded with high performance regimes with them. This means that an explicit decision has to be made at some point in the life of the organization. The timing of application of the strategies is governed by the profitability of the company or the realization of a dire need to adopt a new system. The adoption of the practices calls for a change or as switch from previous old systems to new ones. This calls for an assessment of switching costs and replacement impacts which many organizations may not be willing to engage in given the stringent economic times. Even without considering the costs of acquiring new technology, there are costs that organizations have to incur while setting up the new acquirements. In human resource perspective, it may involve hiring new experts in a certain field which would have an overall effect of increased overheads for an organization. Therefore, when firms are choosing to adopt human resource commitment, cost implications and acquisition of technologies play a huge role. Taking the argument further, it would seem that firms with high profitability, or ignoring the costs factor, then most firms would have adopted the system. However this is not the case as most organizations have not. The reason is that there are non pecuniary costs such as learning costs that hinder organizations from adopting them. The main consideration that firms look into is the benefits that ought to accrue to them in case they adopt the technologies (Bryson, Gomez and Kretschmer 34). This varies in terms of organizations and time frames as well. The impact of high performance HRM practices on workers The application of high performance systems is mainly focused on the performance effect it has on organizations as a whole. It suggests that positive impacts in the work place can be achieved through synergetic interaction of reinforcing bundles that are characteristic of high performance practices. The impacts that the application of these strategies has on workers are different and vary from one organization to another. If an organization realizes positive effects fro application, the same is replicated in the workforce. If no tangible performance indicators can be derived fro application of the strategies, the pressure usually falls to the employees for their inability to deliver output that matches the efforts of the employer to empower employees. The application of motivational, social orientation and other aspects of high performance may not necessarily result in better performance for organizations. In a competitive environment application of high performance HRM may not guarantee high performance. This is the reason why organization in the UK and elsewhere in the world only apply a specific number of strategies in their portfolios that ensure they remain relevant in their industries. The logic is derived in resources available and the ability to utilize them to an extent that depicts employee improvement which can be equated to performance in a sensible way. Most of the surveys conducted regarding the matter have realized that the benefits that accrue to employees cannot be effectively measured. The reason for this is that the surveys focus data derived from managers and not the employees themselves. Therefore, the data suffers from single source biasness (Sparham and Sung 3). The measures say very little about actual benefits that accrue to employees as they have experienced them at a personal level. As a result, it is not possible to point out that a certain specific organization has specific benefits that their employees have enjoyed from the adoption of the practice. Hence, organizations in the United Kingdom cannot use other organizations that have applied the practices as benchmarks or comparing standards to apply in their own organizations. As a result of the shortcomings that are associated with high commitment HRM, it remains highly contested and this is the reason why its application from different points of view is skeptical. The significance of the viability of the approach is considered to be untested and therefore poses a risk to organizations which intend to implement it fully. The testing has no tangible quantitative evidence that organizations can use to base their applications. The main contentious issues that have been identified by critics are the measure of intrinsic job satisfaction among employees, what a positive working environment involves and the co0nnectionj to commitment strategies and performance. Another critique that hinders the adoption of high commitment HRM is that a majority off organizations are in the industries to maximize on profitability. Therefore, the pressure falls on employees to deliver and hence issues such as job insecurity and work intensification and up having the opposite effects of the intended positive results from the strategies (Gooderham 2044). Development of stress by employees when high expectation are put on them and the though of inability to deliver complicates the application. Many employers would not want to put resources in such a risky endeavor where results are unknown especially depending on human nature to accommodate only a specific amount of stressful engagements. Another reason why originations in the UK have been reluctant in implementation of high performance HRM is that most managers and leaders want to maintain a certain specific level of decision making and control in an organization. High commitment HRM allows employees to exercise certain levels of autonomy that would see them make strategic decisions without the consent of supervisors. This is based on the concept that the employees should own their jobs and think critically in dynamic environment. While it has the potential of creating a conducive environment where employees feel more included as an employee involvement (EI) strategy, the level of control may be undefined and wrong decisions may end up being made. In this case, its application is considered risky and hence the skepticism. The application of high performance HRM is associated with Fordism which tailored labor practices that are not advocated for by many organizations. Fordism is associated with a capitalistic form of production and labor practice whose main aim is to maximize profits and nothing else. Organizations make employees adapt to those specific organizations and hence making them unsuitable for other organizations. Specializing employees for specific organizations would only have advantages to the involved organization alone. As a result a labor market of specialized employees to certain organizations is highly undesirable. Furthermore, coming up with strategies to train and develop such a workforce is expensive and employers would not like to lose such employees that they have invested heavily in. Selective hiring and sophisticated selection In order to achieve the high performance HRM strategies, it calls for selection of outstanding personnel. This way, organizations can gain a competitive advantage over their rivals and competitors. Therefore, employers seek to build on individual employees and their abilities to meet certain specific requirements relevant to their job descriptions. The selection of relevant appropriate employees is itself a involving process and uses a lot off resources adding high commitment strategies to this may seem irrelevant as employers have already done through screening in their recruitment process. As a result, high involvement process may end up increasing costs with no results to associate with. Adopting the higher performance strategy also calls for extensive training, learning and development. All this is being done in a majority of organizations in the UK (Guest, David E., et al 294). This is in a bid to keep employees up to date with current issues that affect their portfolios and how they should deal with them accordingly. In this view, organizations in the UK are already employing some of the practices that are advocated for high performance HRM. The difference is the scope of application and the inclusiveness of all strategies that it entails. Conclusion The application of high commitment human resource management promises to have a positive impact on organizational performance. However, a majority of o0raganisations in the UK do not employ this in their human resource management practices. The components of the best practices of high commi9tmnt HRM are applied sparingly in most organizations. First, there has been no proven evidence about the existence of a link between organizational performance and high performance working. Different organizations have a different way of measuring their level of performance. There is no proven proof or quantitative documentation that connects performance to high performance working. Therefore, organizations have no benchmarks or examples they can emulate to have similar effects. If an organization were to choose to invest in commitment HRM, there is sure way of guaranteeing positive results. Secondly the cost of implementing such as strategy calls for a massive investment in acquisition and setting up .This would require specialist hiring and extensive training needs. Many organizations are not ready to invest heavily in unproven strategies. The approach looks promising in a theoretical perspective but its implementation and applicability is yet to be substantiated. Works Cited Bryson, A, R Gomez and T Kretschmer. The Adoption of Voice and High Commitment Workplace Practices in Britain. London: London school of Economics and political science, 2005. de Waal, André A. Working on high performance in the UK an overview of current research and practical application. London: Center for Organizational Performance, 2010. Gooderham, Paul. "The Impact of Bundles of Strategic Human Resource Management Practices on the." The International Journal of Human Resource Management 19.11 (2008): 2041-2056. Guest, David E., et al. "Human resource management and corporate performance in the UK." British journal of industrial relations 41.2 (2003): 291-314. Hughes , Jason . The High-Performance Paradigm: A Review and Evaluation. Cardiff: Cardiff University , 2008. Marchington , Mick and Adrian Wil. Human Resource Management at Work. London: CIPD, 2005. Redman, Tom and Adrian Wilkinson. Contemporary Human Resource Management: Text and Cases. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2006. Sparham, Eimer and Johnny Sung. High Performance Work Practices - Work Intensification or ‘Win-win’? Leicester: University of Leicester, 2009. Read More