| Under the trend of globalization, the enterprises, no matter what size or what nature of the industry, are all facing fierce competition. For surviving, the enterprises must seek a way to build up own internal core competency in order to form the external competitive advantage. A company can last long only if it owns both core competency and competitive advantage. As core competency and competitive advantage are essential factors for the survival of enterprises, it is necessary to clarify the correlation of their relative influence in order to enhance the additive effects between the two. Schuler & Jackson(1987) proposed strategic human resource management (SHRM) which links the HRM with the strategy of the company and indicates that HRM can play a greater role in an organization instead of only a routine administrator. This SHRM emphasis that a company, under the changing environment, has to form their different competitive strategy accordingly, and in response to this different strategy, HRM activities must be adjusted in order to enhance organization's performance and to achieve business goals, which means that HRM should be involved in the strategic integration of the whole organization. Since then, HRM is linked with corporate strategic planning. Literature study also showed that more emphasis on HRM in a company, more performance will be gained. It could be inferred, in theory, there is a positive interaction between HRM, core competency and competitive advantage. And we could survey how deep this influence is through empirical study. Furthermore, the core content of HRM is a series tasks, it is necessary to clarify the different contribution of the task to build-up, to enhance or to maintain the core competency and competitive advantage.Based on the reference of literatures, questionnaire and statistics analysis methods, this study took 267 firms from Guangzhou, Dongguan, Huizhou, Suzhou, Tianjin as sampling to survey "The relative interaction between HRM, core competency and competitive advantage ". The main purpose is to explore the causal pathways, correlations and variables among these subjects through research of the following:(1) Study the mechanism of interaction among three subjects of HRM, core competence and competitive advantage:The existing studies are all focusing on the "dual" causality, none of them studied from the tridimensional interaction. There is also lack of the measure indicators to study the variables in-between. Thus, this study distinguishes the dimensions, designs the measure indicators, establishes a model of mechanism to study and verify the interaction among these three subjects through questionnaire and statistics analysis methods.(2)Verify the direction of the HRM's contribution to the competitive advantage. According to previous studies, most empirical researches appeared positive influence but some have shown no correlation between the two (eg, Pfeffer,1994; Delery & Dory,1996; Lahteenmaki et al.,1998), and thus this study infer, possibly, HRM will affect the competitive advantage through the mediating variable, and, this mediator is the core competence within the enterprise. This study establishes a model of the interacting mechanism, and uses hierarchical regression analysis to verify the "mediation" of the core competence between HRM and competitive advantage.(3)Study the contribution of individual activities of HRM, including recruitment, training, compensation, performance and relationship, to the core competence and competitive advantage of the enterprise. Most of the current studies are based on the direction of a systematic way, none of them from a perspective of HRM individual activity. Thus, this study will distinguish the HRM activities and then verify how they act as the different roles of acquisition, maintenance or upgrading to the core competencies and competitive advantage.Measured through questionnaire and statistical analysis, conclusions are as following:(1) There is "dual" positive and significant causality among the three subjects of HRM (5 dimensions), core competency (three dimensions) and competitive advantage (two dimensions). The empirical results of this study have identified:·The "Recruitment and Compensation management"of HRM can help the company to "acquire" the core competency and competitive advantage.·The "Training and Development Management" can help the company to "upgrade" the core competency and competitive advantage.·The "Employee Relations and performance Management" can help the company to "maintain" the core competency and the competitive advantage.·The "Technical capability " and "market power capability" of the core competency can help the company to "acquire" the low-cost based competitive advantage or to "upgrade" the differentiation based competitive advantage. ·The "Integration capability " of the core competency can help the company to "upgrade"both of the low-cost based and differentiation based competitive advantage.(2) There is a positive link between the three subjects of HRM (5 dimensions), core competency (three dimensions) and competitive advantage (two dimensions), that is the internal HRM activities will form the company's core competency based on which the company is able to gain a competitive advantage. Thus, HRM will not impact competitive advantage directly, but through the mediating effect of core competency to achieve. The empirical results from this study are:·The "technical capability" of core competency will act as the main intermediary role of HRM's effect to low cost based competitive advantage.·The "market power capability" of core competency will act as the main intermediary role of HRM's effect to differentiation based competitive advantage.(3) The individual HRM activities provide different contribution to the core competency and competitive advantage. That is a different focus of HRM activities will form different core competency, which will lead to a different competitive advantage. Analysis from this study expressed the results:·Through the intermediary role of technical capability of core competency, the low-cost based competitive advantage can be improved, thus the HRM's activities should be focused on:·"Employment and Compensation Management" help to acquire the core competency.·"Training and Development Management" help to upgrade the core competency.·"Employee Relationship Management" and "performance management" help to maintain core competency.·Through the intermediary role of market power capability of core competency, the differentiation based competitive advantage can be improved, thus the HRM's activities should be focused on:·"Employment and Compensation Management" help to acquire the core competency.·"Training and Development Management" help to upgrade the core competency.·"Employee Relationship Management" and "performance management" help to maintain the core competency. This empirical research clarified the various dimensions of relations between HRM, core competencies and competitive advantages, identified the role of the mediating effect of the core competence and distinguished the different effects of the different HRM individual activities. Basing on the findings, this study will contribute to both of the academic and the practice. It helps to identify the role and the function of HRM. The enterprise should take HRM as an important asset because HRM will enhance the enterprise's ability of core competency and competitive advantage.
|
PDF Full Text Request