Human Resources Management Practices

The fierce marketing competition drives company to seek new resources to improve their core competences and adapt to changing of the internal and external environment of organisation. A growing number of HR professors argued that strategic human resource management can be regarded as a source of sustained advantage for competition (Zupan and Ograjenšek, 2008). But there are lots of limitations exist in previous literatures, which do not answer questions like which strategic human resource management practice is best fit to enhance performance of organisation or is there any most effective SHRM model? Thus, in the article “the impact of bundles of SHRM practices on the performance of European firms”, authors mainly adopted the quantitative research method to study which bundles of HRM practices would influence the company performance obviously. In result and conclusion, the second hypothesis is denied through statistical analysis and hypothesis 1 is partially supported by authors’ research. Although authors use a wide range of data in thousands of organisations from different countries and draw a conclusion which based on appropriate data analysis method, there are still some weaknesses in the process of research. In this paper I will critically evaluate the research design, research approach and methods of original article.

In this article, authors take a deductive approach in the research. Research questions are raised clearly according to findings of previous studies then authors plan to exam which practices can promote performance most effectively and they come up with two hypothesis based on literature review. In the deduction process, researchers need to put forward some hypothesis after reviewing previous studies, and then ...

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... strategies can be used. Firstly researcher should combine deduction, induction and abduction approaches together, not only describe relationships of variables but also explain reasons and correct exiting theory. Secondly, researchers fail to consider contingency factors so they should combine with longitudinal study design or take action research strategy that regard the research as a dynamic process. Thirdly, authors should employ multiple research method that includes quantitative and qualitative together because the data is relatively old in this study, thus they could also interview HR managers in the organization or use case studies to collect latest information and provide explanations for their theories. Finally, authors should combine stratified random sampling and systematic random sample together to ensure sample can cover each region in the equal chance.