Search results

The role of the HR business partner has been heralded as the salvation of HR and the route to making a strategic contribution. Sharon Brockway, director for Roffey Park’s new HR Business Partnering program, explores why business partnering too often fails to live up to expectations and examines how HR at Lloyds TSB was successfully repositioned from playing a transactionary role to a more strategic one.

Highlights the reasons for the move to HR partnering and the advantages it can bring.

Suggests three essentials of successful HR partnering – understanding, resources and credibility. Explores each in some depth, and illustrates them with cases based on the experience of European companies.

Advances the view that there is no one best way to implement partnering; the HR model and its pace of introduction should be tailored to the organization.

Offers practical advice and suggestions on judging readiness for partnering, and for putting the key requirements in place.

Helps readers to gauge their organizations’ readiness for partnering, and to avoid some of the pitfalls. Also proves valuable to organizations that have begun their partnering journey.

Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) theory, the purpose of this paper is mainly to show how electronic human resource management (HRM), green employee empowerment, and human resource (HR) business partner role may influence green HRM practices.

A conceptual framework was proposed to test the direct effect of the three independent variables – and key HR factors – on green HRM. Self-administered questionnaire was adopted in a systematic collection of data from manufacturing and service organizations in Malaysia. The partial least squares method was used to test the conceptual framework of the study.

The empirical results demonstrate that green employee empowerment has a significant positive relationship with all dimensions of green HRM practices; the added value of HR business partner role is an important aspect in ensuring the successful implementation of green HRM practices; and surprisingly, electronic HRM was not significantly related with all dimensions of green HRM practices.

As revealed by searches of ISI Web of Knowledge and Scopus, there is no similar work which tested a similar framework based on evidence from an emerging economy. Based on RBV, it is possible to suggest that green employee empowerment and the role of HR as a Business Partner constitute unique resources when adopting green HRM practices.

This paper outlines the importance of HR Business Partner using business data in order to contribute at a strategic level.

Provides evidence for a three year pan‐European case study of the correlated link between a HR influence on employee engagement and customer loyalty and financial performance. Also provides anecdotal insights of HR professional's historical approach to data and a way of using business data strategically.

Provides two charts ‐ one which demonstrates the link between HR disciplines and the business and one which depicts the different types of data that the HR professional can gain value from.

Urges HR Business Partners to address their knowledge gaps in understanding business data and provides an outline of useful data sources.

Highlights the importance of business data in providing a credible and strategic HR contribution.

The purpose of this study is to target utilizing Human resources (HRs) data analytics that may enhance strategic business, but little study has examined how it affects components. Data analytics, HRM and strategic business require empirical investigations and how to over come HR data analytics implementation issues.

A semi-systematic methodology for its evaluation allows for a more complete examination of the literature that emerges theoretical framework and a structured survey questionnaire for quantitative data collection from IT sector personnel. SPSS analyses data.

Future research is essential for organisations to exploit HR data analytics’ performance-enhancing potential. Data analytics should complement human judgment, not replace it. This paper details these transitions, the important contributions to theory and practice and future research.

Data analytics has grown rapidly and might make HRM practices faster, more efficient and data-driven. HR data analytics may improve strategic business. HR data analytics on employee retention, engagement and organisational success is insufficient. HR data analytics may boost performance, but there is limited proof. The authors do not know how HRM data analytics influences firms and employees.

Data analytics offers HRM new opportunities, along with technical and ethical challenges. This study makes a significant contribution to HR data analytics, evidence-based practice and strategic business literature. In addition to estimating turnover risk, identifying engagement factors and planning interventions to increase retention and engagement, HR data analytics can also estimate the risk of employee attrition.

A place in the boardroom is often considered a necessary if not sufficient condition for HR directors to exercise strategic influence on business decision‐making. The purpose of the paper is to explore the perceived importance of HR boardroom representation, both in a formal and symbolic sense, and to what extent HR directors can exercise strategic influence without it?

Evidence is explored from a survey of 1,188 UK HR practitioners, including 255 board members, and a series of follow‐up interviews with 16 HR directors.

Analysis of the survey findings suggests that boardroom versus non‐boardroom representation of HR appears to matter in four key areas: board members believe they have greater involvement and influence in business planning processes; they have more positive perceptions of the overall performance of HR; they give higher ratings of CEO perceptions of the HR function; and they believe they achieve greater integration of HR strategy with business strategy.

While there are increasingly other formal mechanisms and forums (e.g. executive committees, personal networks) outside the boardroom for HR directors to exercise their influence, it appears that the “symbolic capital” of boardroom recognition and esteem still retains enormous significance and rhetorical appeal for the HR profession.

The paper seeks to reframe the debates on the relative importance of HR boardroom versus executive committee representation as forums of strategic influence, by focusing on the continued symbolic significance of boardroom representation. It is concluded that a reworking of Bourdieu's concept of “symbolic capital” (i.e. professional esteem, recognition, status, or respect) as board capital may be useful in reframing future research on HR boardroom representation.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the different rationales for devolving people management responsibilities to the line and examine their consequences for the HR function and HR’s interactions with line managers and employees.

A model was developed and tested that describes how the rationale for devolving people management to the line influences the HR function, HR’s interactions with line managers and the quality of people management. Survey data were collected from 446 managers who reported that their organisations had devolved people management to the line.

Results indicate that devolution rationales are associated with distinct changes to the HR function’s strategic integration and size. These changes in the HR function are in turn associated with utilisation of line manager focused HR practices, HR’s business partner orientation and people management effectiveness.

The HR function should consider changes that refine job descriptions to include a clear statement of people management responsibilities, ensure performance appraisals incorporate an assessment of people management effectiveness and prioritise line manager training and rewards in an environment where line managers may be less than enthusiastic about their newly acquired people management responsibilities.

The study contributes to the devolution literature by outlining how the effects of devolution are tied to the rationale underlying devolution efforts. It suggests that the tendency to conceptualise devolution without reference to the reason why it is pursued may be contributing to the controversy over its consequences.

Based on the human resources (HR) role framework (Conner and Ulrich, 1996), the purpose of this paper is to empirically explore why HR practitioners differ in their strategic partner role positioning. The present study suggests and tests a descriptive model regarding occupational and organizational characteristics associated with strategic HR role positioning.

In all, 100 questionnaires were collected from Israeli HR practitioners. Hierarchical regressions were used to test the association between occupational and organizational characteristics and the strategic role perception among HR practitioners.

Although the findings only partially supported the suggested model, significant associations between occupational and organizational characteristics and HR strategic positioning were found. HR practitioners in volatile organizational environments adopt a strategic role perception. Moreover, years of experience are also associated with an HR strategic role perception. Specifically, the major predictors of attaining a strategic partner role amongst HR practitioners are location of organizational activities mainly in the metropolitan area, and involvement in major organizational changes.

The sample had a positive bias of respondents. Questionnaires were delivered mainly to highly educated HR practitioners in notably professional HR departments. Data were based on self-reported one-time questionnaires.

The research has implications for the processes of academic education and professional training of HR practitioners and also their recruitment in organizations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, recent studies aimed at exploring sources of variance in the strategic role perception amongst HR practitioners are rather scarce. This research helps to address this gap, while also broadening the literature regarding HR communities in the Middle East.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the requirements modern companies expect of HR professionals’ competences.

Departing from the widely acknowledged HR competence studies of Ulrich and associates, we extended them with the continuous learning competence profile and HR professionals’ individual job performance. The empirical study is built on open interviews with HR leaders of ten large Dutch companies.

The study offers a new set of HRM competences. This set includes six HRM profiles: Business Focus, Learning Focus, Strategic Focus, HR Technology, HR Delivery, and Personal Credibility. Several contingency factors are thought to play a role in supporting these HRM competences: company culture, strategy, size, sector, scope, and position of HR professionals.

Based on these contributions, we recommended conducting a quantitative study to gain understanding of the relevance of the individual HRM job performance and to find associations between the HRM competences and the individual HRM job performance.

The focus of this chapter is a combination of HRM competences and the individual job performance of HR professionals.

Describes how pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca moved from site and functionally based human resources (HR) teams that offered a full range of generalist support, to a “one team” approach. A 15 percent cost reduction in service delivery over 3.5 years and a fall in the number of HR staff by 15 percent is intended to payback by 2006 the £5 million investment necessary to implement the new HR platform. Cost savings are firmly linked to improvements in service quality.

Highlights the inefficiencies of the old system and the ways in which the change to the new system was brought about.

Contends that the use of HR metrics helped to demonstrate to the AstraZeneca businesses the value of what HR does, and other business‐support services within AstraZeneca are now considering adopting similar models to the HR delivery model. The fundamental rationale behind the programme – to create a more efficient and customer‐oriented delivery of HR services by getting the right customer‐oriented mindset across to HR, combined with the specific skills to manage customer interactions both at strategic and transformational levels – has become a reality. The “one team” approach has brought together everyone involved in HR delivery and there is a great sense of team working, improved communication, a much more consultative approach and a customer‐focused culture. HR is now in line with organizational strategy and is a value‐adding part of the business, contributing to the bottom line.

Highlights the importance of training and good internal communications in helping to overcome reservations about the new system and bring about its smooth implementation.

Contains plenty to interest top management in major corporations who are thinking about restructuring their HR function to achieve greater efficiency.