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This study aims to provide a conceptualisation of HR outsourcing (HRO) effectiveness from a service quality perspective and subsequently develop a scale – HROSERVPERF to measure HRO service performance underpinned S-O-R theory.

Grounded on theoretical conceptualisation, literature and information collected through semi-structured interviews, HRO service performance items pool were generated. 257 responses from manufacturing firms in Malaysia that have outsourced their HR were collected. PLS-SEM is used for scale confirmation and validation.

The conceptualisation of HRO effectiveness and HRO service performance suggests a need for scale development that encompasses service quality-satisfaction-loyalty framework supported by S-O-R theory. Operational improvement, resource alignment and service delivery emerged as the service performance dimensions of HROSERVPERF.

This study was limited to manufacturing firms in Malaysia, hence little generalisation could be drawn beyond this context. However, this serves as future research opportunities.

HR managers and service providers can employ HROSERVPERF to measure and improve HRO service performance more effectively. Service providers can re-strategise and target their scarce resources to better retain their clients.

This is the first paper that provides HRO effectiveness conceptualisation from a service quality perspective followed by a scale development with formative measures using PLS-SEM underpinned S-O-R theory.

The purpose of this study is to provide deeper and broader insights into human resource outsourcing (HRO) trends and practices specific to the Malaysian context.

Data were collected from HR managers through a questionnaire-based survey, using convenient sampling with random selection.

HRO practices were found to have evolved into second-generation outsourcing, with considerable potential to grow further in the future. Firm size and sector had little or no effect on the degree of HRO. Both cost benefits and resourced-based benefits were key drivers of HRO decisions, with a majority of the firms reporting having achieved these benefits equally and positively. Most of the functions outsourced were traditional-transactional HR functions. Slightly more than half of the HRO decisions were made by top management without the involvement of HR managers. More than half of the firms surveyed intended to do more outsourcing in the near future (i.e. within the next two to five years), including firms that had previously experienced HRO failure.

While convenience sampling limits the generalisability of the findings, it is suitable for a study like this, especially as there is no pre-established list of firms outsourcing HR available in Malaysia. The study did not cover trends in either HR shared services or insourcing – either of which could potentially affect future HRO trends in the future. The findings also serve as a warning to future HRO researchers about the importance of contextual knowledge to strengthen the validity of their findings.

The findings provide both practitioners and service providers with insights into HRO practices and trends in Malaysia, which are comprehensively discussed in the paper.

This paper presents a broad, yet up-to-date, overview of HRO practices and trends specific to the Malaysian context. It covers aspects and details of HRO not explored or explicitly discussed before.

This paper investigates how agile capabilities in humanitarian settings work in combination, and its effects on performance outcome. The study was conducted in the frame of reference of response operations during cyclones and floods, which is considered most complex and with the most widespread impact.

A survey-based method was used to collect empirical data on response operations from 131 field officers who were involved in disaster response during cyclones or floods. A partial least square based structural equation model was used to study the path model of interaction of agile capabilities, and their effect on performance outcomes.

The results show that integration of agile capabilities is important for enhancing effectiveness of humanitarian response. The results indicated a serial mediation effect involving visibility, responsiveness and flexibility capability on the effectiveness of emergency response.

This research has implications for response units of humanitarian organisations. This includes capacity building for key agile capabilities, integration, supply chain re-configuration and differential positioning of response phase as against preparedness and recovery phases.

This study is unique for the chosen humanitarian setting, which is considered most difficult. The authors demonstrate from empirical evidence the interaction effects of agile capabilities during response phase for cyclones and floods, and their impact. The research insights will help practitioners to configure and position supply chains for better effectiveness during response operations, which have markedly different objectives vis-à-vis other phases or types of humanitarian settings.

This study demonstrates how becoming a high-reliability institution in health care is a priority, given the high-risk environment in which an error can result in harm. Literature conceptually supports the need for highly reliable health care facilities but does not show a comprehensive approach to operationalizing the concept into the daily workforce to support patients. The Veterans Health Administration closes the gap by documenting a case study that not only demonstrates specific actions and functions that create a high-reliability organization (HRO) for safety and improvement but also created a learning organization by spreading the knowledge to other facilities.

The authors instituted a methodology consisting of assessments, training and educational simulations to measure, establish and operationalize activities that identified and prevented harmful events. Visual communication boards were created to facilitate team huddles and discuss improvement ideas. Improvements were then measured and analyzed for purposeful outcomes and return on investment (ROI).

HRO can be operationalized successfully in health care systems. Measurable outcomes verified that psychological safety was achieved through the identification and participation of 3,184 process improvement projects over a five-year period, which yielded a US$2.8m ROI. Documented processes and activities were used for educational teachings, which were disseminated to other Veteran Affairs Medical Center’s through the Truman HRO Academy.

This case study is limited to one hospital in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) network. As the VHA continues to deploy the methods outlined to other hospitals, the authors will perform incremental data collection and ongoing analysis for further validation of the HRO methods and operations. Hospitalists can adapt the methods in the case study for practical application in a health care setting outside of VHA. Although the model is rooted in health care, the methods may be adapted for use in other industries.

This case study overcomes the limitations within literature regarding operationalizing HRO by providing actual activities and demonstrations that can be implemented by other health care facilities.

The causal conditions leading to successful human resources outsourcing (HRO) have until now attracted only limited research attention. To address this shortcoming, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how a firm and a HR provider should work together to ensure successful HRO.

By applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the authors demonstrate how combining in different ways provider quality, business understanding, trust, and closed HRO networks can lead to HRO success. In addition, this study compares the causal combinations between cases with differing levels of HR-task interdependence and IT use.

The results of this study reveal three common solutions that lead to successful HRO from both economic and relational viewpoints. The findings also indicate that, from an economic viewpoint, trust is a core condition for achieving HRO success. Moreover, HR-task interdependence and IT use alter the number of solutions and the conditions for attaining HRO success.

Based on the solutions proposed herein, firms can consider different ways to achieve HRO success under diverse conditions.

This work also contributes to building new theories regarding HRO, trust, knowledge sharing, and IT use.

The purpose of this paper is to complicate and critique contemporary scholarship on high-reliability organizations (HROs). This paper argues that although HRO scholarship helps to identify communicative patterns that facilitate reliability and safety, it also simplifies processes that undermine the effectiveness of existing recommendations for HROs.

This paper frames high-reliability organizing as the enactment of mindfulness, which is the theoretical mechanism behind each of the five principles of high-reliability organizing. Using this framework, this paper then elaborates on each of the HRO principles: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise.

This paper details how research guided by HRO theory must address the following obstacles to safety and resilience: information accessibility limiting preoccupation with failure, identity constructions encouraging the simplification of interpretations, message fatigue repressing sensitivity to operations, the information environment within HROs weakening commitment to resilience, and generational differences impeding deference to expertise.

This paper highlights key issues obstructing safety and reliability in organizations that have been largely ignored by extant literature and encourages scholars to do more to acknowledge the role communication plays in constituting and reconstituting organizational reliability. Failing to fully address complex communicative interactions in HROs obstructs efforts to safeguard employee health and safety.

This paper aims to investigate the principles of high reliability organisations (HROs), present in safety and crisis teams, as applied to innovation teams. Safety and crisis teams cannot fail, as failure leads to disaster and casualties. Innovation teams cannot fail either, as this harms the organisations’ competitiveness and effectiveness. Do HRO principles, rooted in mindful infrastructure, enable innovation resilience behaviour (IRB)?

A study of 18 innovation projects performed by project teams was carried out. A survey by team members/leaders of these teams was completed; team members/leaders of other projects were added to achieve a larger sample. Mindful infrastructure consists of team psychological safety, team learning, complexity leadership and team voice. The analyses assessed the teams’ mindful infrastructures as a causal condition enabling IRB.

Applying qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), the findings indicate that mindful infrastructure enables team IRB, which is a set of team behaviours indicating their resilience when encountering critical incidents. Teams apply different “paths” to IRB.

The exploratory study’s generalizability is limited. The findings nonetheless indicate the usefulness of non-linear techniques for understanding different roads to successful innovation processes.

HRO principles are applicable by non-HROs. These require investments in organisational learning.

HRO studies fail to account for the antecedents of HRO principles. This study groups these antecedents of team behaviour into a mindful infrastructure. QCA has not been applied within the domain of HROs before and only scarcely within the domain of innovation teams.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the conduct of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), based on a real-life case study of one company in Malaysia. The paper analyses the company’s process of recruitment outsourcing from beginning to end, in three sections: RPO decision, RPO implementation and RPO outcome.

The case study was carried out through semi-structured interviews with relevant respondents, including the country HR manager, the HR staff and operation managers in the organisation, plus with the RPO provider.

The key findings, from a theoretical and academic viewpoint, are that RPO decisions and implementation cannot be fully or properly explained by one theory, but are better explained by integrating transaction cost economics, the resource-based view and the Agency Theory. The study also highlights the importance of involving end users in the RPO process.

While this single case study gives a clear, in-depth insight into the issues in this particular instance, future research extending to a wider range of organisations would serve to expand the findings and provide more generalisable results.

Practitioners and service providers should be able to draw valuable lessons from the experience of Tech-solution, particularly from the different perceptions and levels of satisfaction about the service provider’s performance between internal HR and the internal end users (operation managers).

This paper provides a specific and detailed analysis of RPO implementation in practice. It also addresses the call for more RPO outsourcing-specific research in the extant literature.

Leadership‐focused companies get financial results, Organizations must focus on building adaptive capacity, Study finds mixed views of HR outsourcing

As humanitarian organizations often operate in highly volatile environments, a good understanding of their learning mechanisms would improve the knowledge acquisition and retention in these organizations, and complement the formal logistics education and training for their relief staff. The paper explores the following research question: what learning mechanisms are used by humanitarian organizations to acquire sufficient knowledge for their logistics operations.

The paper opts for a theoretical study based on the existing literature. We apply organizational learning theory to examine the learning process and mechanisms of humanitarian organizations. An actual case is used to validate the findings.

The study develops a theoretical framework for the learning mechanism of humanitarian organizations, and reports four learning mechanisms: learning by hiring, learning by doing, learning by observing, and learning by searching. Five propositions are proposed for empirical validation.

Because of the theoretical nature of the study, the research is still an exploratory one. The organization learning literature employed is not comprehensive. Researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

The paper includes implications for humanitarian organization to better manage their learning processes, improve the effectiveness of their knowledge management, and benefit more disaster-affected people.

This paper fills a gap in the learning processes and knowledge management of humanitarian organizations.