Human Resources
Essays

For a firm to thrive, it must offer a unique product so it can ensure that it can deliver a sustained competitive advantage that cannot easily be undercut by price or substituted by a similar product offered by a firm…

Building Streamlined Supplier Relationships Within the Organisation Using SAP

Shareholders, managers and employees are working hard for sustainable, profitable growth of their companies and often without success. Sustaining growth requires a strategy for increasing revenue without sacrificing…

As an industry outsourcing is developing quickly. It is an optimistic experience for most companies that have outsourced, that have inclination to outsource some more, and 45% have increased the capacity of their…

There are several significant advantages of using qualitative measurements in marketing research. The most significant is the ability to capture the voice of customers that may have evaded the more structured, numerically-based approaches that force respondents to provide a specific set of answers. Qualitative research can also lead to entirely new insights into a new market or service that has not been seen in the past, given the open-ended questions inherent in this approach to research. Qualitative research techniques also can be used to capture the shared knowledge of experts as well, as the Delphi Technique is so well-known and used for. Capturing the tacit expertise and knowledge of a specific group of thought leaders can also be accomplished using qualitative techniques as well. Additional advantages of qualitative measurements include the ability to complete greater exploratory or primary research into a specific subject, often following a specific line of questions as they develop within an interview. An additional advantage of qualitative research techniques are the ability to understand how prospects and customers make trade-offs on substitute products and services. While price elasticity studies are often highly quantitative in scope, the use of interactive discussions of pricing trade-offs can be highly effective in determining just how much a prospect is willing to sacrifice price for a given feature or benefit. The total value of a brand can also be ascertained through the use of these types of qualitative techniques, providing respondents with the ability to define in their own terms the value of the experience a brand delivers. The many advantages of qualitative research are predicated on having more interactive sessions with respondents, including the ability to ascertain how they make trade-offs over time on value versus price. For the many advantages of qualitative measurements, there are several disadvantages as well. First, the results of any study predicated on this approach cannot be analyzed at the higher levels of statistical analysis. As the results of studies and research completed with qualitative measurements are by nature not nominal, ordinal or interval in terms of data orthogonality, they cannot be used to represent an entire customer or segment population. At best they can be used as a means to capture nominally-based data that can lead to only a rough approximation of an overall market size or series of market dynamics. Qualitative data can only be as useful as the means used to capture it as well; if a methodology is very informal and focused on a series of loosely-guided objectives, the overall data will of mediocre quality at best. When the goals and objectives of a research study, in addition to the sampling frame and methodology lack rigor or precise focus, the resulting research can also lack precision and meaning. It is more difficult to create greater levels of meaning and transferability of data when the methodologies are highly qualitative in scope; the data is only relevant for a specific series of objectives and often is defined by applicability to a given point in time as well. Qualitative data is often also open to interpretation, as the methodology can be debated in terms of its relative appropriateness, robustness and value over the long-term. Finally, qualitative data cannot be taken entirely on its own; it must be combined with a series of other research sources to ensure relevancy and accuracy of interpretation, especially over time. In conclusion, qualitative data needs to be taken in context and often balanced with quantitative data to ensure a 360-degree view of a given situation or strategy of interest has the greater level of insights gained from research efforts.

The most valuable and mercurial asset any enterprise has is the knowledge, insight and intelligence of its employees including the immense amount of tacit and implicit knowledge each has gained over decades of experience. A high performance work system (HPWS) seeks to synchronize the many work structures, systems, processes, implementation decisions and frameworks around a common series of strategic priorities and initiatives (Boxall, 2012). Galvanizing together the many components of a HPWS are the Human Resource Management (HRM) systems, both manual and automated, in addition to the most critical areas of governance that serve as a stabilizing force in organizational cultures (Wood, de Menezes, 2011). Making these many components stay synchronized and focused on a series of strategic objectives is difficult, and made even more challenging when industry and market turbulence is introduced (Preuss, 2003). An HPWS must be agile enough then to react to the turbulence in economic terms yet stable enough to provide a foundation for cross-cultural growth and profitable operations of an enterprise (Mittal, 2011). Any architectural framework then for an HPWS must have elements necessary to ensure a very high degree of agility and shared value creation from the standpoint of collaboration and communication (Boxall, 2012). It must also be designed to enable a very high degree of shared information and knowledge development, as the best-performing HPWS systems are actually knowledge-sharing ecosystems (Hartog, Verburg, 2004). With all of these aspects of an HPWS needing to stay in synchronization as the people, processes, systems, external competitive environment and internal culture of a company change, anchoring these systems in core principles is critical to their stability, scalability and long-term value in any enterprise (Varma, Beatty, Schneier, Ulrich, 1999). It is the intent of this paper to analyze the fundamental principles that have proven invaluable in keeping HPWS agile in turbulent times. These for principles include shared information, knowledge development, performance-reward linkage, and egalitarianism (Varma, Beatty, Schneier, Ulrich, 1999).

It has many times been assumed that, once a person reaches a leading position, his or her professional life would become easier to be dealt with; even though, only a small number of people do realize that a manager's…

The Burke-Litwin Causal Model examines the organizations transitional and transactional variables for fit, synergy and conflict. Each of these variables contributes to the performance of the company, and that…

Som, Ashok. (2010). "Emerging Human Resource practices at Aditya Birla Group." Human Resources Management. 49 (3): 549-66.

Barriers to retaining special education personnel.