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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 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.

This study aims to investigate the perspectives and experiences of treatment facilitators regarding the effectiveness of treatment they delivered for high-risk offenders with complex needs. Within this study, the term complex needs refers to an individual who is managing several issues, such as physical illness, mental health issues and addiction disorders.

There was a total of 18 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with treatment facilitators from Australia and the UK. This study presents two key themes that emerged from the thematic analysis: “the importance of responsivity and active/creative activities in practice” and “the practitioner’s core concerns: issues with high-risk offenders treatment accessibility”.

The findings revealed that treatment facilitators considered treatment responsivity as core to treatment for high-risk offenders with complex needs and that active/creative activities were beneficial in achieving this. Additionally, treatment facilitators expressed concerns around the inaccessibility of treatment, including the barriers of talk therapy and the inability for offenders to receive the level of support necessary. Considering these findings, this study offers a discussion on the potential value of music therapy as a component of treatment for such offending populations.

The empirical data yielded from the interviewed treatment facilitators highlight that music therapy can play a role in supporting the beneficial components of treatment programs. Further implications centre on addressing the limitations of treatment that were identified through the interviews.

This study focusses on exploring the role of music therapy with high-risk offenders and who have complex needs when engaging in treatment programs. This paper recognises that the application and use of music therapy with this cohort has been neglected in the academic literature and research until recently.

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.

Given the pace of industry change and the rapid diffusion of high reliability organization (HRO) approaches, lags and divergences have arisen between research and practice in healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to explore several of these theory-practice gaps and propose implications for research and practice.

Classic and cutting-edge HRO literature is applied to analyze two industry trends: delivery system integration, and the confluence of patient-as-consumer and patient-centered care.

Highly reliable integrated delivery systems will likely function very differently from classic HRO organizations. Both practitioners and researchers should address conditions such as how a system is bounded, how reliable the system should be and how interdependencies are handled. Additionally, systems should evaluate the added uncertainty and variability introduced by enhanced agency on the part of patients/families in decision making and in processes of care.

Dramatic changes in the sociotechnical environment are influencing the coupling and interactivity of system elements in healthcare. Researchers must address the maintenance of reliability across organizations and the migration of decision-making power toward patients and families.

As healthcare systems integrate, managers attempting to apply HRO principles must recognize how these systems present new and different reliability-related challenges and opportunities.

This paper provides a starting point for the advancement of research and practice in high-reliability healthcare by providing an in-depth exploration of the implications of two major industry trends.

Two simultaneous trends have arisen in the field of HRM: the development of the human resource (HR) function toward a more strategic, value adding unit and the trend of HR outsourcing (HRO). Opinions are divided in the field of HRM research regarding the interdependences between these two trends and whether the HR function has a positive or negative effect. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the triangular relationship among strategic HR integration, the HR-to-employee ratio and HRO.

This study analyses data from three large evaluations conducted in 14 European countries and compares the results obtained from the 2000, 2005 and 2010 Cranet survey waves. For the hypotheses, a multilevel regression design was used.

The results allow concluding that HRO supports the professionalization of the HR function in an effort to make it a strategic asset.

This study extends prior understandings of the theoretical perspective on HRO and its organizational impact. The sample is nested within 14 European countries and influenced by cultural aspects and institutional factors. These influences could be an exciting avenue for further research.

This paper includes important implications for HR practitioners. The results support a rather optimistic view of the HR function regarding its relationship with HRO and the latter’s impact on the HR-to-employee ratio and strategic HR integration.

The study answers the question: has HRO downsized internal HR staff over the past decade, and how is it related to the strategic integration of the HR function? In this context, this study analyses Cranet data to contribute to the discussion on the development of strategic HR integration and the impact of HRO on such efforts. Moreover, the study examines the influence of HRO on internal HR staff based on the theoretical framework of the resource-based view.

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.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the unique contributions from social (i.e. trust climate, departmental integration) and organisational factors (i.e. managerial recognition, goal clarity and technology support) to work engagement and identification with the organisation in a human resource offshoring (HRO) context.

Participants were recruited from a large Australian financial institution with an HR centre located in the Philippines. Ninety-one members of the captive HR centre completed the anonymous online questionnaire consisting of quantitative items and open-ended fields. Regression analyses were conducted to ascertain the relationships hypothesised.

The findings suggest that goal clarity is a key predictor of both engagement and identification with the organisation, and that technology support and managerial recognition also influence offshore staff members’ motivation and workplace attitudes.

The cross-sectional, self-report nature of the study, along with the small sample obtained, are noted as limitations of the study. Nevertheless, the high response rate (91 per cent) and availability of qualitative data provide valuable insight into the key factors that impact HRO operations and performance.

The study uncovers social and organisational variables that affect staff motivation and attitudes in an HRO context, and offers a number of guidelines for practitioners operating in these settings, focussing on goal clarity, managerial recognition and technology support.

The study contributes to a growing body of research into the organisational and human capital factors that account for HRO performance and sustainability, and offers preliminary evidence for their unique contributions to key performance drivers. Guidelines for future research and business practice are proposed, namely, the consideration of multilevel and temporal approaches to the management and investigation of HRO operations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether insights into high reliability organizations (HROs) are useful for innovation management teams. HRO teams can keep failure to a minimum level due to high alertness and resilience. Project teams working on innovation management could benefit from HRO principles and thus reduce their chances of failure.

A survey among in total 260 team members and team leaders of project teams in innovation management was conducted to study the relation between, on the one hand, organizational features of HROs (“mindful infrastructure”) and HRO principles (adjusted as “innovation resilience behaviour”, IRB), and on the other hand, between mindful infrastructure and IRB and project outcomes.

From the results it could be concluded that mindful infrastructure associates with IRB, and that IRB has a mediating role in the relation between mindful infrastructure and project outcomes. Innovation management project teams can thus learn from the practice of HRO teams.

To the authors’ knowledge, HRO-thinking has not been applied to team behaviour in innovation management. A fruitful transfer of insights from the domain of safety and crisis management seems applicable to the domain of innovation.

Long-term care (LTC) organizations have struggled to protect their vulnerable clients from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although various suggestions on containing outbreaks in LTC facilities have gained prominence, ensuring the safety of residents is not just a crisis issue. In that context, the authors must reasses the traditional management practices that were not sufficient for handling unexpected and demanding conditions. The purpose of this paper is to suggest rethinking the underlying attributes of LTC organizations and drawing insight from the parallels they have to high-reliability organizations (HROs).

The authors analyzed qualitative data collected from a Canadian LTC facility to shed light on the current state of reliability practices and culture of the LTC industry and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional management approaches.

To help the LTC industry develop the necessary crisis management capacity to tackle unexpected future challenges, there is an urgent need for adopting a more systemic top-down approach that cultivates mindfulness, learning and resilience.

This study contributes by applying the HRO theoretical lens in the LTC context. The study provides the LTC leaders with insights into creating a unified effort at the industry level to give rise to a high-reliability-oriented industry.