| Guest (2011), the famous scholar in Organizational Behavior and HRM, pointed out that most researches on HRM in the past20years had proved that there is positive association existing between HRM and organization performance. But questions as to"why there exists such positive association" and "how it came into being" remain unresolved. Guest believes that recent theorectial study in this field has entered into a stage of growing sophisticaiton and complexity, which pushes the theoretical study of SHRM to extend and evolve in two directions-the first one is, under what condition, there exists positive association between HRM and organization performance? The second is the exact process in which HRM improves organizaiton performance. The former focuses on the effect of organizaiton context on the relationship between HRM and organization performance, while the latter leads to the formation of the Multi-level Theory of SHRM.Proposed by Golbert (2004), RBV expounds that internal consistent logic relationship exists between the HR architecture and a specific organization context, with the former based on HR principles, HR policies, HR practices and HR products. Proposed by Wright and Nishi (2010), the Multi-level Theory Model put forward that the process of HRM’s effect on organizaiton performance is actually a transformation from organizational regular routines to individual scheme, and a "leap" from individual coordinated behavior to organizational HR performance.The two dimensional and major logic reasoning sequence is comprised by RBV’s view that there exists an internal consistent logic relationship between HR achitecture and organization context and Multi-level Theory Model’s view that multi-level cause and effect logic reasoning based on organization’s internal consistence. The dissertation constructs a multi-level system model of SHRM to achieve a combinaiton of the two logic sequences and elaborates a principle of strategic human resource development inside organizations, which demonstrates differentiation, high performance and coordination. Based on a complete multi-level cause and effect logic link, the dissertation provides an overall explanation for SHRM "Black Box". Specifically, the dissertation explores theoretically in the following three aspects:(1) put forward that HR practices fit with organization dependent and differentiated social context to produce organizational social norms based on win-win development of both organization and idividual; HR practices fit with organization dependent and differentiated task context to produce observable and measurable high performance organizational behavioral norms. Social norms and behavioral norms comprise HR behavioral principles and they serve as the guidline of the overall HR management inside an organization. According to this, organizations can further formulate internal consistent HR strategic plans including HR targets, notions and policies, which provide forseeable gurantee for organizations to achieve their strategic targets.(2) Put forward that actual HR practices fit longitudinally with the goals, notions, guidlines and policies written in HR strategic programs; based on the design of organizational career management (OCM) and the design of standard combination and incentive convergence, organizations can achieve an internal systematic fit of each actual HR systems, which further guide the employees to form a scheme characterized by role matching, development alignment and consistent notions and corresponding strategic behaviors of employees demonstrating differentiation, high performance and coordination.(3) Besides the above theoretical elaboration and expansion, the dissertation also embeds acquirable and impartable "double knowledge" norms combined by knowledge curriculum system(organizaiton’s explicit knowledge vehicle) and a teaching team of internal training (organization’s implicit knowledge vehicle). This avoids the abstractness and poor feasibility existing in the direct transformation of organization’s normal practice into employee’s cognitive scheme in previous multi-level theoretcial model.Through the above theoretical expansion in three aspects, the dissertation explains the origin of organization’s HR behavioral, principle HR policies and actual HRM systems and the innate logic relations between three HR system levels and a given organizational context from the angle of HR system consistency. It also provides a more reasonable theoretical explanation for the process of SHRM Black Box effect, namely, the transformation from HR behavioral principle on organizational level to knowledge norms of"double knowledge" combination, then to employee’s individual cognitive scheme.As is pointed out by Guest (2011), multi-level theoretical analysis depends on longitudinal data, which means that empirical studies will become increasingly difficult as we attempt to enter into a more complex level in research method, and this is especially true when the research target is not inside one organization but a cross-organizational one. The reason lies in that it would be a daunting task for multi-level analysis to acquire sufficient detailed information of organizations internal context. In addition, the limited longitudinal data brings yet another question:we can’t know for sure as to when and by whom the good HR activities were introduced into the organizations, which makes it necessary to conduct researches on the original HR practices. Therefore, an possible alternative would be to choose some enterprises that have adopted original HR practices with desirable effect and conduct researches on them in order to identify the reasons for their success.The multi-level architectural model, integrated by RBV and multi-level theory, carries on the method of cause-and-outcome logic reasoning displayed in Wright and Nishii’s multi-level model construction. Through the introduction of Becker and Huselid’s SHRM fit view, and the multi-context integration of Wright and McMahan, the dissertation expands the assumption of Wright and Nishii’s multi-level theoretical model, and establishes the multi-level theoretial analysis of SHRM on the complete cause-and-outcome logic reasoning. The logic consistent HR architecture makes up for the inadequacy of Colbert’s analogical reasoning. The dissertation uses the method of case study based on creative practice.Finally, the dissertation summarizes the research findings and theoretial contributions to SHRM Black Box, points out the drawbacks of the present work and calls for further studies on the same subject. |
