Research On The Marketing Quality Of China 's Human Resource Managers: Willingness, Process And Strategy

The attention of the top management team is a critical and scarce resource in an organization, and therefore how top exsecutives allocate their attention and time among a series of potential strategic issues determines the strategic direction and behavior of the organization to some extent. Dutton and Ashford put forward the concept of Issue Selling, which refers to the process by which individuals and groups affect other’s attention and understanding of the events, developments, and trends that have implications for organizational performance. Issue Selling shapes the time and attention devoted by an organization, thus influencing strategic actions and change of the organization.Previous studies on issue selling concentrate on willing to sell Gender-Equity issues, and issues-selling activities in single organization, but are still quite lacking in issues-selling process. Nor do they distinguish between issue-selling-activities of different functional departments. As departments differs from each other in terms of status and influence power, it becomes much more challenging for managers from weak departments to carry out issue-selling activities. As the human resource department does not have a direct and measurable impact on firm performance, and further confounded by other factors, this department becomes vulnerable in quite some organizations. Consequently, human resource management remain at the administrative level, but fails to play strategic role. Accordingly, it’s of great value to study human resource manager issue selling.This study posesses theoretical and practical significance in the following areas: to begin with, it expands the theoretical model dealing with issue selling willing, and finds that the nature of the issue selling, competency characteristics of the human resource manager, the openness characteristics of top executives all contribute to human resource manager issue selling willing. Secondly, this study constructs a theoretical model dealing with human resource manager issue selling process, explores the acting path of human resource in exerting strategic roles, and theoretically proves that issue selling is a significant route for human resource department to realize its strategic role. Lastly, the exploration of issue selling strategy provides guidance for human resource manager to play a strategic role as well as raise the influence power in the organization. This study centres on how human resource manager carry out issue selling activities, and analyzes human resource manager issue selling willing, human resource manager issue selling process, and human resource manager issue selling strategy, which forms the core of this study. To achieve the this goal, we adopt such methodologies as in-depth interview, grounded theory, and process theory to explosively study human resource manager issue selling in12firms.The forth chapter of this thesis deals with human resource manager issue selling willing. In this chapter, we conduct an open coding analysis of the factors influencing human resource manager issue selling willing in order to identify the concept of the influencing factors and develop their categories. We find that the value of issue selling, characteristics of human resource manager, characteristics of senior executives, cultural inclusiveness, the perceived value of human resource manager, along with the perceived probability of success, and the perceived opinion of political support all contribute to human resource manager issue selling willing. Based on these findings, we resort to principal axis compiling method to relate the category and sub-category of influencing factors. We use compiling method to construct a theoretical model dealing with human resource manager issue selling willing. We find that such factors as the value of issue selling, cultural inclusiveness, characteristics of senior executives, and characteristics of human resource manager impact human resource manager issue selling willing through three intervening variables, i.e., the perceived value of human resource manager, along with the perceived probability of success, and the perceived opinion of political support.The fifth chapter of this thesis deals with human resource manager issue selling process. As qualitative study differs greatly from quantitative study in terms of methodology in coping with this problem, we use event-driven method of qualitative study to carry out a cross case comparative study on the eight processes of human resource manager issue selling. First of all, we develop three event track core concepts on the foundation of literature review and interview materials, i.e., issue selling state, issue selling participation, the attention and attitude of principal decision maker. Secondly, we use the three event tracks to measure the data of human resource manager issue selling process, i.e., define and identify incidents, evaluate the reliability and validity of incidents, develop incidents into coded event constructs, as well as evaluate the reliability and validity of these coded event constructs. Lastly, on the basis of process data measurement, we conduct a process series analysis of human resource manager issue selling, figure out six issue selling events such as issue perception, issue selection, issue proposal, issue deliberation, issue wrap-up and issue prrresentation, and build a theoretical model dealing with human resource manager issue selling process.The sixth chapter of this thesis deals with human resource manager issue selling strategy. Based on the results of process analysis, we use the open coding method of grounded theory to study human resource manager issue selling strategy, and find a total of256conceptual strategy reference points, and31categorical issue selling strategies. Finally, we describe human resource manager issue from the dimentions of issue process, principal locus of control, and issue selling strategy.This study boasts such innovation points as follows:firstly, this thesis pioneers in combining human resource with issue selling in terms of research perspective. By comparing marketing activities of different industries, as well as of different human resource issues, this thesis breaks through the limitations of single character issue selling and single organization issue selling of prior studies. Secondly, this thesis demonstrates that issue selling is a significant route for human resource department to realize its strategic role. Thirdly, this thesis constructs a theoretical model dealing with human resource manager issue selling willing, analyzes the influencing factors as well as the mental mechanism for human resource manager to initiate issue selling, and proves that competency characteristics of the human resource manager and the nature of issue selling are the key factors impacting human resource manager issue selling. Forthly, this thesis proposes a theoretical model dealing with human resource manager issue selling process from the perspective of influencing agent, and describes the progress and variation of the process. Lastly, this thesis develops a set of human resource manager issue selling strategies, and expands the theory of influence strategies.Nevertheless, this thesis is lacking in the following aspects:in the first place, this thesis only uses grounded theory to construct a model of human resource manager issue selling willing, but does not provide empirical evidence. Secondly, this paper mainly uses interview materials to form the database of human resource manager issue selling process but fails to conduct triangulation by turning to other source of materials. Thirdly, this thesis studies issue selling from the view point of influencing agent, i.e., human resource manager, but does not take into acount the view point of target, i.e., principal decision maker, as a result, this thesis does not offer the appraisal of issue selling strategy validity by principal decision maker.