HRM summary – by Lynouk van Hassel
Chapter 1
The Evidence-based HRM process:
1. Understanding a problem
2. Formulating a question
3. Local and external evidence
4. Evaluating evidence: Validity, reliability, and generalizability
5. Generating alternative solutions
6. Considerations for implementation
7. Evaluation
Employment relationship: An exchange relationship between an employee and an organisation,
where employees provide labour and employers reward employees for their contribution.
HRM: The sum of all strategy, policy, procedures and day-to-day acts that together aim to guide
employment relations in organisations towards the goals of the organisations, while ensuring
alignment with various contextual conditions.
Recruiting phases
- Entry pahse: People develop from being an outsider to a member of an organisation.
- Work: The employee can work for some time.
- Transitoin: Finally the employment relationship may change or end, due to transition in
organisations, career or life stages.
Rational decision making: Considering all information and weighing it according to some criteria
before taking a decision. The choice in HR is an example of bounded rationality.
Bounded rationality: An effort to the best decision given an imperfect understanding of reality (you
miss information). There are strategies to add more rationality to decision making. But they are
often neglected e.g. quick fixes.
Quick fixes: Are decisions that are likely produce HR practices based on personal experience,
outdated management theories and management fads for which it is not evident that they are really
effective in solving the problem. Though, the benefit is that it shows that someone is willing to take
immediate action, there are also risks:
Missing what the matter truly is -> rush to solve the problem.
o The risk of skipping this, is that the choice of HR practices may not really tackle the
underlying issue.
It often leads to another quick fix
It appears that quick fixes often lead to harm the firm or do nothing at all, it is also seldom
evaluated thus increasing the risk that the quick fix will be used again.
EB-HRM proposes a method to take decisions in a more rational way, while simultaneously
recognizing the importance to account for power and politics in organisations.
Theory – the origins of evidence-based management
EB management pleads that practioners do some research into the nature of a problem, gather
information from different sources within the organisation and from experts and research source
before they suggest an intervention. For decades, practioners blamed scientists for producing
,research findings that are too hard to find and too far away from the daily needs of practioners
anyway. Some strategies to close the gap between practioners and scientists:
- Researcher make more effort to explicate the practical implications of their findings and to
make these available for practioners.
- Co-creation: Practioners are closely involved in the design and execution of the research.
o It is challenging, there is an abundance of information that tends to be very technical
and difficult to read, even despite all the initiatives to open science for practice.
- Evidence-based management: It actively helps practioners to find and use scientific
evidence.
o The roots of evidence-based management comes from medicines
o Centre of evidence-based management: Founded in 2010 to make management
decisions evidence based.
Though it is relatively new, some managers can still rely on the knowledge
they had gained before all this, but it takes time to implement this.
EB-HRM: It is a conscientious, explicit, and judicious decision-making process to address important
people-related issues in organizations by combining the best available research evidence with
measurable data and professional knowledge available in organizations
Core elements of EB-HRM:
Decision making by practitioners who consciously apply their expertise and judgment
Use of evidence from the local context to which the decision applies
Critically evaluate the best available
external research evidence
Take perspectives from people who could
have been harmed by the decisions
This means that EB-HRM is not about applying
the best practices. Equally effective HR practices
are available to solve a problem, practitioners
may evaluate the use of each alternative in the
light of means and requirements of the
organization in question.
Strategic decisions: Involve using resources (time,
people, money) and are supposed to lead to
some substantial outcome that matters for (a
part of) the organisation.
HRM decisions: Substantial outcomes can range
from pure business results (profit, innovation,
strategic change) to ensuring a business adapts to
its environment (labour, markets, employment
relations, society) or to improve the work and
lives of employees.
Rational: It means that decision makers who engage in a decision-making process first have an idea
about what they want to achieve with the decisions and then use some methodology to gather
appropriate information and weigh various alternatives before deciding on the best solution.
, Rational decision-making theory: This is likely to improve the quality of decisions. The problem with
rational decision-making is that people are not machines. Because
- People have limited knowledge and present cognitive processes, they are not able to
process information neutrally, nor do they have the capacity to know everything.
- It is also limited by their cognitive processes, including their understanding of the problem
and their preferences and blind spots, and by their social context, including access to
knowledge in others and their own position in organizational power, politics and conflicts
Bounded rationality: It suggests that it is possible to take the best decision given an imperfect
understanding of reality. Strategies for improving decisions under bounded rationality focus on
explicating the decision-making process in a number of specified steps.
EB-HRM proposes a strategy to improve the decision-making process, because it proposes a
sequence of diagnosing, understanding, gathering alternatives before jumping to a solution. It is
flexible enough to incorporate new insights and changes along the process.
EB-HRM policies and practices will contribute to improved performance of organizations, better
alignment of organizations with their contexts, and ultimately to the well-being of employees.
When is EB-HRM not useful:
- Crisis time
- Non-strategic daily issues
Steps in EB-HRM:
Part 1; Asking a focused question: Exploring the problem and determine the problem statement.
After deciding it is worthy to start an EB-HRM process;
Define the outcome as specific as possible
Problem statement
Specific human resource management domain
Specify the targeted group of employees
Part 2; Collecting evidence:
Evidence in HRM: It proves the existence of causality: An empirically observable relationship that
suggest a mechanism through which a cause leads to an effect.
Evidence in management context: It concerns an understanding about all the causes that lead to the
current state of an outcome, and about causes that may improve the outcome.
Importance of causal evidence: It shows where interventions will most likely improve an outcome.
Evidence-based management discerns four sources of evidence:
- Organizational evidence: All sorts of management information that is present in the
organisation.
- Stakeholder evidence: All the opinions and perceptions about the problem and its causes by
everyone who is involved in the problem (managers, suppliers etc)
o Experiential evidence: Knowledge from previous problems and projects in the
organisation.
o Scientific evidence: What is known about the problem and its causes in science
(external evidence)
