Human Resource

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and workers' overall job satisfaction and their satisfaction with pay. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses British data from two different cross ...

A growing literature on determinants of innovative performance focuses on factors such as market structure, firm size, (regional and international) knowledge spillovers, R&D collaboration, conditions for appropriation of innovation benefits, and others. This paper contributes to an aspect that is still sparsely explored: The impact of labour relations and Human Resource Management (HRM) practices on a firm's innovative behaviour. Our empirical findings identify that active HRM policies, including job rotation, performance pay, and high qualification levels of personnel contribute positively to innovative performance.

W hile modern organizations are more diverse today than three decades ago (Bell, 2007; Cox & Blake, 1991; Thomas & Ely, 1996), leaders continue to grapple with how to support and enable relationships among people who are engaged in a common enterprise but "who do not share a common history or culture" (Caproni, 2005, p. 269). While lower ranks within the organization may be used as examples of effective human resource policies and programs for enhancing diversity, a lack of diversity exists within senior leadership in most organizations that has been attributed, in part, to systemic barriers facing underrepresented demographic groups, including women and people of color (Eagly & Carli, 2007). A key human resource strategy that has been suggested as a catalyst for addressing barriers to advancement and developing more diverse leadership is formal mentoring (Hardy, 1998; Tyler, 2007). In this article, the concept of interorganizational formal mentoring (IOFM) is introduced as a valuable tool for the leadership development of people of color within organizations as they attempt to break through into top levels within their organizations. Before focusing explicitly on the experiences of African Americans, it is instructive to explore the diversity context that influences the empirical work presented here.

As the largest archipelagic nation with thousands of islands, the establishment of infrastructure for marine and coastal spatial data is indispensable. Six technical working groups have been formed as a component of spatial data information management in the Marine and Coastal Resources Management Project (MCRMP). The groups’ responsibilities are to determine the standard of spatial database, the data clearinghouse and custodianship among stakeholders and improvement of human resource. After the discussion with stakeholders, some standards have been established and some agreements have been reached to be implemented in the further stage of national spatial data infrastructure.

Problem According to the International Health Regulations (IHR), countries need to strengthen core capacity for disease surveillance and response systems. Many countries are establishing or enhancing their field epidemiology training programmes (FETPs) to meet human resource needs but face challenges in sustainability and training quality. Indonesia is facing these challenges, which include limited resources for field training and limited coordination in a newly decentralized health system. Approach A national FETP workplan was developed based on an evaluation of the existing programme and projected human resource needs. A Ministry of Health Secretariat linking universities, national and international partners was established to oversee revision and implementation of the FETP. Local setting The FETP is integrated into the curriculum of Indonesian universities and field training is conducted in district and provincial health offices under the coordination of the universities and the FETP Secretariat. Relevant changes The FETP was included in the Ministry of Health workforce development strategy through governmental decree. Curricula have been enhanced and field placements strengthened to provide trainees with better learning experiences. To improve sustainability of the FETP, links were established with the Indonesian Epidemiologists' Association, local governments and donors to cultivate future FETP champions and maintain funding. Courses, competitions and discussion forums were established for field supervisors and alumni. These changes have increased the geographic distribution of students, intersectoral and international participation and the quality of student performance. Lessons learnt The main lesson learnt is that linkages with universities, ministries and international agencies such as the World Health Organization are critical for building a sustainable high-quality programme. The most critical factors were development of trusting relationships and clear definitions of the responsibilities of each stakeholder. Une traduction en français de ce résumé figure à la fin de l'article. Al final del artículo se facilita una traducción al español. ‫املقالة.‬ ‫لهذه‬ ‫الكامل‬ ‫النص‬ ‫نهاية‬ ‫يف‬ ‫الخالصة‬ ‫لهذه‬ ‫العربية‬ ‫الرتجمة‬

The broad aims of this study are to gain insight into employees'on-the-job learning activities to help them improve their on-the-job learning. The authors define on-the-job learning styles and operationalize the concept to include both mental and overt learning styles and both interpersonal and intrapersonal learning styles. Organizations and employees can benefit from an awareness of employees'on-the-job learning styles, by developing an adaptive flexibility in the use of on-the-job learning strategies.

Police analysts are required to unravel the complexities in data to assist operational personnel in arresting offenders and directing crime prevention strategies. However, the volume of crime that is being committed and the awareness of modern criminals make this a daunting task. The ability to analyse this amount of data with its inherent complexities without using computational support puts a strain on human resources. This paper examines the current techniques that are used to predict crime and criminality. Over time, these techniques have been refined and have achieved limited success. They are concentrated into three categories: statistical methods, these mainly relate to the journey to crime, age of offending and offending behaviour; techniques using geographical information systems that identify crime hot spots, repeat victimisation, crime attractors and crime generators; a miscellaneous group which includes machine learning techniques to identify patterns in criminal behaviour and studies involving reoffending. The majority of current techniques involve the prediction of either a single offender's criminality or a single crime type's next offence. These results are of only limited use in practical policing. It is our contention that Knowledge Discovery in Databases should be used on all crime types together with offender data, as a whole, to predict crime and criminality within a small geographical area of a police force.

This paper examines the setting up of accounting procedures and policies in sampled SMEs from Bihor, county selected after criteria of size at the end of 2008. In order to conduct our research we have set up a questionnaire of 25 questions which has been applied to 100 SMEs. The obtained results showed that out of the 83 respondents, only 92,68% agree with the provisions of Article 10 of Order 3055/2009, according to which entities must develop their own accounting policies approved by the managers, only 75,60% of the respondents agree that the existence of written accounting policies at the enterprise level improves the quality of financial reporting and managers' decision making process and a significant number of respondents (21,95%) do not know the fact that during a financial year, a firm's accounting policies cannot be changed. The most relevant result of our investigative research consist in identifying the need to train the human resources involved in the process of writing and applying accounting policies and procedures in SMEs and the necessity to set up a manual of accounting department.

Cross-cultural research is dominated by the use of values despite their mixed empirical support and their limited theoretical scope. This article expands the dominant paradigm in crosscultural research by developing a theory of cultural tightness-looseness, the strength of social norms and degree of sanctioning within societies, and advancing a multilevel research agenda for future research. Through an exploration of the

The implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is nowadays a key issue for companies. The problems that can appear during their integration, which is always a difficult task, are nowadays better identified, even if their origins are often multiple and complex. This study focuses on the integration of the human resource characteristics in business processes, which is a key issue for the ERP adoption and optimisation phases. In that purpose, it is suggested to better adapt business processes to human actors by explicitly taking into account concepts like the role, competence and knowledge of human resources. It is shown on a practical case-the implementation of PeopleSoft TM in a university-how these concepts may optimise ERP implementations by better identifying the requirements and possibilities of the workforce, with the final goal of increasing the efficiency and acceptability of the system to be implemented.

This paper documents a shift in the nature of innovation in the information technology (IT) industry. Using comprehensive data on all IT patents granted by the USPTO from 1980-2002, we find strong evidence of a change in IT innovation that is systematic, substantial, and increasingly dependent on software. This change in the nature of IT innovation has had differential effects on the performance of the IT industries in the United States and Japan. Using a broad unbalanced panel of US and Japanese publicly listed IT firms in the period 1983-1999, we show that (a) Japanese IT innovation relies less on software advances than US IT innovation, (b) the innovation performance of Japanese IT firms is increasingly lagging behind that of their US counterparts, particularly in IT sectors that are more software intensive, and (c) that US IT firms are increasingly outperforming their Japanese counterparts, particularly in more software intensive sectors. The findings of this paper thus provide a fresh explanation for the relative decline of the Japanese IT industry in the 1990s. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence consistent with the hypothesis that human resource constraints played a role in preventing Japanese firms from adapting to the shift in the nature of innovation in IT.

This article develops a relational perspective on the coordination of work. Existing theory suggests that relational forms of coordination should improve performance in settings that are highly interdependent, uncertain and time-constrained. Going beyond previous work, we argue that relational coordination should also improve job satisfaction by helping employees to accomplish their work more effectively and by serving as a source of positive connection at work. Using a cross-sectional sample of nursing aides and residents in 15 nursing homes, we investigate the impact of relational coordination on quality outcomes and job satisfaction.

Over the last years, many organizations started to use Distance Teaching tools as instruments in employees' qualification programs, creating what we may call E-learning or Virtual Training in Human Resources Development Programs. However, usually these organizations tend to use technological resources already available, and do not shape their technological platform into a pedagogical project. Recent advances in the field of Intelligent Teaching Systems have proposed the use of Artificial Intelligence through architectures based on agents' societies. Teaching systems based on Multi-Agent architectures make possible to support the development of more interactive and adaptable systems. The objective of the paper is to discuss the feasibility of implementing Distributed Intelligent Learning Environment -DILE based on the Multi-Agents Architecture approach, aiming at the achievement of human resources qualification through Virtual Training. Besides, we present a proposal of an architecture named JADE -Java Agent Framework for Distance Learning Environments.

This article focuses on how membership in a selflrater agreement group (underraters, accurate raters, overraters) is related to self-ratings and others' ratings of self-awareness and leadership effectiveness. It also examines gender differences in the likelihood of selfhater agreement and in perceived self-awareness. Finally, fhe article examines agreement group and gender differences in terms of two components of self-awareness: knowledge of self and willingness to improve. Contrary to common belief, our research shows that women are not more likely to underrate their own skills on measures of leadership competency, and that gender differences do exist, both in rated self-awareness and in one of its subcomponents, knowledge of self. In addition, this research found underraters were rated highest in self-awareness by direct reports and highest in terms of overall leadership effectiveness. Managers who tend to overrate themselves compared to others' ratings were perceived as lowest of the three groups in both self-awareness and effectiveness.

Non-union forms of employee representation have become increasingly prominent in UK workplaces in the last 15 years. In addition, partnership working has been encouraged by New Labour, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Confederation of British Industry and the TUC as a route to higher commitment and higher individual and organisational performance. These trends have been further encouraged by recent European Union legislation. This article seeks to examine the implied linkages between non-union employee representative mechanisms and partnership working and their influence on the effectiveness of employee voice as a conduit of high performance. The article is based on a case study organisation from within the UK finance sector, and data are drawn from semistructured interviews with managers and staff and a survey of employee attitudes. The article concludes that employers' attempts to utilise a non-union partnership framework for organisational gain are severely constrained by structural limitations on effective employee voice.

Purpose: Teacher hiring decisions have far-reaching consequences for a school, its students, and faculty. This article examines how new teachers in four states are hired and explores whether the process leads to good matches between these individuals and their schools. The authors conceive of hiring as a two-way process and examine the extent to which the hiring process provides opportunities for prospective teachers and schools to collect rich information about, and form accurate impressions of, one another.Research Methods: This study surveyed a representative random sample of 486 first-year and second-year teachers in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Participants were chosen using two-stage stratified cluster sampling, and the study achieved a response rate of 65%. Statistical methods used in the analysis include principal components analysis, chi-square analysis, and t tests.Findings: The data reveal that the majority of new teachers in these states are hired th...

Despite its grounding in a specific and peculiar set of facts, the strict scrutiny mandate of Wisconsin v. Yoder (decided in 1972) has changed the constitutional landscape of custody cases - and it has done so in a way that is unsound both as a matter of law and policy. Following Yoder, most courts require a showing of harm to the child, or a substantial threat of harm to the child, before placing any restrictions on exposure to a parent's religious beliefs and practices. This harm standard leaves children in an untenable position when parents compete for "spiritual custody," for the law can protect them only when the risk of harm is already substantial. Indeed, the bar is set so high that few courts have found circumstances that satisfy the harm standard. In this essay, I argue that a strict scrutiny standard has no place in spiritual custody cases. It is hardly consistent with the basic principle that the custody court's paramount consideration is the best intere...

To develop a culture of total quality management, a hotel company must make its human-resources department a full-fledged player in the hotel's operations, because specific human-resources practices ntial to a successful TQM program. k it" M a k i n g the move from a traditional management philosophy to a total-quality-management (TQM) culture demands much from an organization. Nowhere is this demand more apparent than in the human-resources-management function. Certain human-resources practices are required to support a TQM-based culture. To determine which H R practices are most essential to TQM, I examined the

Much of existing research on employee engagement is deficient in examining organizational actors' lived experiences of organizational engagement activities. This article, deriving from qualitative research in a public-private partnership organization, contributes to the current understanding of how employee engagement is generated through management communication activities seeking to promote engagement and employees' responses thereto. Drawing also on the literatures on organizational change, communication and culture, our research demonstrates that (1) managers use both directive and discursive means of communication to create an environment in which employees may wish to engage and (2) employees respond positively to such communication as it makes them feel valued and involved, which enhances their propensity to engage with the organization. However, contrary to widespread assumptions in the literature, the generation of employee engagement is far from straightforward; employees have an active role to participate in the engagement activities offered by managers.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been witnessed. This evolution reflects both the increasing maturity of information technology and also the business outlook of firms seeking to use IT for competitive advantage. In this paper we argue that system development is now entering a new phase of maturity with the advent of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software packages.

Does temporary work provide a way for individuals to improve their skill levels? Using a sample of more than 4,000 employees of US temporary staffing agencies, we analyse whether blue, white and pink-collar temps get access to company training, and the impact of skill development on wages and employee retention. We find that less than 25 per cent of temps take part in training. Educated and experienced individuals are more likely to be offered training, but lower-skilled individuals are more likely to take training when it is offered and spend more hours on it. Office workers who took part in training were more likely still to be with the agency a year later and experienced significant wage growth, while training had no effect on wage growth for blue-collar workers. Skill development that took place on the job was associated with greater wage growth for all types of temps.

The topics of leadership and organizational culture have attracted considerable interest from both academics and practitioners. Much of the interest in the two areas is based on explicit and implicit claims that both leadership and culture are linked to organizational performance. However, while the links between leadership and performance and between culture and performance have been examined independently, few studies have investigated the association between the three concepts. This paper examines the nature of this relationship and presents empirical evidence which suggests that the relationship between leadership style and performance is mediated by the form of organizational culture that is present. The paper concludes with a number of implications for theory and practice.

The lack of human resources is one of the main bottlenecks to achieving the Millennium Development Goals on maternal and child health. A coherent national policy, recognized across government, needs to be in place to overcome this especially in countries severely affected by HIV/AIDS. Such a policy should cover selection of pre-service students, the qualifications of trainers and training sites, supportive supervision, career path development, a package of carefully thoughtout incentives for the retention of staff, strategies for interaction with communities, and an agreed-upon health staff HIV/AIDS policy. Without such coherent human resource planning, a large number of countries will fail to reduce maternal and newborn mortality.

for appropriateness in their culture. U.S. students had significantly higher appropriateness ratings than Eastern students on clarity of presentation, enthusiasm, classroom interaction, and spatial-behavioral communication behaviors. Western students exceeded Eastern students in all areas except spatial-behavioral communication behaviors; ratings of non-U.S. students were predicted by field of study and age.

An undeniable shift in focus from traditional production companies to Knowledge-Intensive Firms (KIFs) poses challenges for academics and practioners alike. In particular, effective management of an organization’s human resources has become a critical issue for ensuring sustained innovation capacity. The relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) in KIFs is however still a largely unexplored arena. The objective of this paper is to explore this relationship in an effort to identify HRM practices that support innovation. To this end, the paper includes reviews of the literature relevant to HRM and innovation in KIFs and four case studies from companies in Denmark and Australia that have been recognized for excellence in innovation. On the basis of content analyses conducted on the case data, some preliminary conclusions are posited regarding the role of HRM in KIFs. More specifically, the findings from this study suggest that while there are commonalities between HRM practi...

Artificial intelligence can be used to efficiently automate diagnostics, analytics, logging, administering and decision making in the healthcare industry which is facing a human resource crunch in the present times. Artificial intelligence though offers very attractive solution for automation and cyber physical systems; but comes with technical, legal and most importantly ethical concerns. In this work, we discuss the challenges associated with incorporation of artificial intelligence in human resources management. We suggest a layered framework to adopt AI based tools and techniques for improving healthcare services. We also discuss the roadmap to evolve into a smart healthcare industry with clear separation of tasks between cyber physical systems and the human resource. We conclude this work by discussing the possible future directions in the area.

Human Resource (HR) researchers haw a tendency to generalize their results and prescriptions across a wide range of organizations without regard to possible contingencies. This can be dangerous. This article demonstrates the nature of the difficulties that can arise in two ways. First, by comparing hypotheses concerning the relationships between HR policies and practices and firm performance derived from the high-tech and entrepreneurial literatures, and highlighting the inconsistencies. Second, by testing the applicability of these hypotheses to a hybrid form of organization, namely, the high-tech entrepreneurial startupfirm. The results shim some support for the high-tech model, and more limited support for the entrepreneurial model, suggesting the need for more contingency-based notions of HR strategy. Implications are drawn for both research and practice. In search of generic theories regarding relationships between Human Resource (HR) management practices and firm performance, researchers often fail to investigate variations that occur across organizational forms (cf. Tichy et al., 1982; Debejar and Milkovich, 1986; Dyer and Holder, 1988). The tendency is to ignore such possible contingencies as industry and organizational life-cycle position (Balkin and Gomez-Mejia, 1987). The theoretical dangers of this have been highlighted by Miller and Mintzberg (1983). Yet, there have been few attempts made to empirically validate the point, especially in the field of HR management. The tendency to ignore key contingency factors is especially apparent in two contemporary bodies of literature. The first concerns HR policies and practices in high tech firms, and has tended to concentrate on organizations well past the entrepreneurial start-up stage, such as govern-* The authors wish to thank Yair Aharoni and the Jerusalem Institute of Management (Tel Aviv, Israel) for supporting the data gathering stage of this study. We are also grateful to Ralph Hybels, Deborah Knight, and Tal Simmons for their comments on earlier drafts.

The field of 3d animation has addressed design processes and work practices in the design disciplines for in recent years. There are good reasons for considering the development of systematic design processes for the development of 3d animation and it's teaching. Design ...

As the challenges of managing across borders become increasingly complex, companies are exploring innovative ways to organize and manage people. Many are turning to the use of transnational teams composed of individuals from multiple nationalities working on tasks that span multiple countries. This article reports the findings from a study of human resource practices used in 34 transnational teams from 23 multinational firms. The article provides specific examples of how staffing, training, and rewards systems are adapted to support the strategic orientations of these teams. 1

This article examines the attitudes of a key set of state government officials-state human resource (HR) professionals-toward employment at will (EAW) in state government. It presents original survey data obtained from HR professionals in four southern states: Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Mississippi. Drawing on these data, the article creates an index measuring respondents' commitment to EAW, as measured by their attitudes toward arguments used to advocate for EAW. The index is used as the dependent variable in an exploratory regression analysis indicating the importance of respondents' experiences with the exercise of EAW discretion, years of public sector service, educational background, and state context to explaining variation in commitment to EAW. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings' implications for the future of civil service reform in the United States.

Using a triangulation of three methods, we devise a framework for the acquisition of the resources vital for the start-up of a business in South Africa. Against the backdrop of the fact that numerous challenges prohibit African immigrants from starting a business, let alone growing the business, we set out to investigate how those who succeed acquired the necessary resources. Within the quantitative paradigm, the survey questionnaire was used to collect and analyze the data. To compliment the quantitative approach, personal interviews and focus groups were utilised as the methods within the qualitative approach paradigm. The research revealed that an African immigrant entrepreneur is most likely to be a male between the ages of 19 and 41 who has been forced to immigrate by political circumstances. Once in South Africa, limited job opportunities forced these immigrants into starting-up a business. In order of importance, financial, informational, human and physical, resources were identified as being critical for the start-up a business. With respect to the acquisition of resources, African immigrant entrepreneurs unwillingly made use of personal savings to finance their businesses during the start-up phase of the business. Financial resource played a double role in that it determined the main sources of physical resources used. From a human resource perspective, African immigrant entrepreneurs preferred employing South Africans during the start-up phase of the business, and the reverse was true during the growth phase. To a limited extent family labour was involved at both the start-up as well as the operation phases of the business; with formal education and prior experience playing an indirect role as far as the human resources mixed were concerned. In terms of information, African immigrant entrepreneurs made use of two primary sources of information namely; their ethnic networks and friends from somewhere else.