Study Examines Multiple Types of Organizational, Employee Fit in HR Practice
Jason Ross |
A recent study by two faculty members in ĚđąĎĘÓƵapp’s College of Business takes a multi-faceted look at the different meanings of “fit” within the human resources practices of a business or organization.
The research examines both the various types of “organizational fit” that can come into play as a part of human resources strategies and how the personal characteristics of different employees can “fit” in with those business practices.
Bryan Schaffer and Jason Ross, assistant professors of management at WCU, shared the results of their study at the Southern Management Association Conference in Greenville, South Carolina, in October in a presentation titled “Fitting Together: Human Resource Practices, Generic Strategies and Employee Alignment.” Schaffer and Ross are in the process of revising their paper for publication in an academic journal.
In the study, the faculty members take an unorthodox approach that examines three types of strategic fit within a single conceptual framework. Those three strategy types are innovation, which involves offering something new and different; quality enhancement, which involves enhancing existing products and/or services; and cost reduction, which involves trying to be the low-cost producer.
“We think our paper is unique in that it examines three types of fit, together in one conceptual framework,” Schaffer said. “We use theories related to both personal identity and social identity to examine how employees fit with both HR practices and the organization’s strategy.”
Previous research indicates that strategic human resource management has been shown to affect the overall performance of an organization, but the varying impacts of different types of human resource practices on a firm’s generic strategies has gone relatively unexplored, the faculty members say.
“This paper attempts to rectify the situation by examining just which human resource practices enhance an organization’s competitive advantage by exploring the alignment between HR bundles, generic strategies and how employees fit within these realms,” Ross said.
Schaffer agreed. “Our theoretical model combines these three aspects proposing that the greater the alignment between individual employees and human resource practices, the greater the likelihood of a firm’s successful strategy implementation,” he said.
An organization’s strategic human resource management practices must align with the industrial environment and overall strategy of the firm in order to achieve optimum competitive advantage, the authors say. Those human resource practices should be grouped together – or “bundled” – to best fit with a firm’s generic strategy, they say.
“We propose that bundles related to empowerment best align with innovation strategies, bundles related to motivation best align with quality strategies, and bundles related to enhancing skills best align with low-cost strategies,” Ross said.
In addition to the fit between a firm’s human resource bundles and its strategy, these bundles must also fit with a firm’s employees, Schaffer said. A key contention of this paper is that the stronger the fit between employees and the human resource practices a firm utilizes, the easier it is for a firm to implement its strategy, he said.
“Our work supports prior research done on person-organization fit and person-job fit," Schaffer said. ”These streams of research are useful for understanding how employees are attracted to the organization and how they are retained, minimizing potentially dysfunctional turnover.”
In addition to being disruptive to the activities of an organization, a high level of employee turnover also can be expensive because the costs are higher to recruit and hire new workers than to retain existing ones, the researchers said.
“One thing that I would add that is unique about the paper is that we match certain strategies with particular types of fit,” Ross said. “Depending on the strategy, the congruence with fit needed within the organization lessens or strengthens.”
Among the study’s findings is the importance of employee brand alignment, especially among newer Gen Z employees (workers born between 1997 and 2012). When employees develop their own personal branding in terms of their identity and values in a style that is consistent with the organization’s brand and mission, positive functional outcomes are to be expected, the researchers say.
“Prior research has shown that this type of brand identification is often an antecedent to positive organizational behavior outcomes, such as citizenship behaviors,” Schaffer said. “From a personal and social identity theory perspective, employees who identify strongly with the organization brand should engage in discretionary behaviors, display positive norms and provide additional effort, as they integrate the overall strategy and purpose into their own self-concept.”
Schaffer and Ross say additional research about alignment across employees, strategy and the organization is needed for different age groups in order to develop a better understanding of generational variations.