Human Resources has undergone a major transformation over the past three decades.[1] Instead of solely pursuing a functional approach of delivering services, HR professionals now seek to develop and support the critical firm capabilities that drive business strategy. [click to continue…]
April 2010
When assessing the essentiality of HR within a firm, one must first ask what is meant by the word “essential” within a business context. The trickiness here, however, is that such a definition is highly contingent on the type and size of a particular firm. [click to continue…]
On the afternoon of April 22, the Cornell HR Review held an awards ceremony for its annual essay competition. Open to all Cornell students, this year’s competition challenged students to respond to one of three prompts, which addressed such topics as talent management, the right to organize, and the essentiality of HR. [click to continue…]
KEY FINDINGS
· HR and line managers intrinsically believe that high-performing companies have more progressive HR practices and effective HR functions. Likewise, they assume less successful companies have less effective HR functions.
· Experienced people (such as senior executives with long tenure) are more likely to hold personal beliefs about the impact of HR practices on performance (i.e., implicit performance theories) than are less experienced people (such as graduate students).
· These beliefs are likely to result in research that overestimates the impact of HR on firm performance.
KEY FINDINGS
· While practitioners and researchers assume that higher employee satisfaction equals higher sales and profits, analysis shows that there is no direct link between the two.
· Between the beginning point of employee satisfaction and the endpoint of profitability lie three crucial intervening factors: employee retention, employee responsiveness to customers, and customer satisfaction.
· By understanding the interplay among these factors, organizations can target their HR efforts to positively affect the bottom line.
Recommended Citation
Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies. (2010, April). Identify critical factors to turn workforce satisfaction into bottom-line results (CAHRS Research Link No. 6). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, ILR School.
Environmental sustainability is a widely debated topic—one that the labor movement has tightly embraced and one that more and more HR practitioners are required to confront with regards to personnel policy, training, and CSR. [click to continue…]
Paying for expatriate support is a necessary cost of doing business. And that cost becomes more and more difficult to control as expatriate assignments increase in number and geographic diversity. [click to continue…]
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KEY FINDINGS
* If employees feel their family life interferes with their work, they tend to feel guilty. They’re actually less likely to feel guilt when they feel work interferes with their family life, possibly because it’s increasingly acceptable for work to spill over into our private lives.
* People with traditional gender role views (i.e., believe men should be primarily responsible for work, and women for family) tend to experience more guilt when their family interferes with their work, regardless of gender.
* People with more egalitarian gender role views (i.e., feel men and women can equally share work and family roles) tend to experience more guilt when their work interferes with their family time.
* Men with the most traditional gender attitudes experience the most guilt when their family conflicts with their work, compared to women, and compared to more egalitarian men.
* Contrary to the popular perception that only women are affected by work-family conflict, men also experience guilt from this conflict—sometimes even more so than do women.
Suggested Citation
Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies. (2010, April). Work-family conflict not just a women’s issue: Helping all employees find work-life balance (CAHRS Research Link No. 5). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, ILR School.
Recommended Citation
Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies. (2010, April). Believable or biased? Overestimating the impact of HR practices on firm performance (CAHRS Research Link No. 7). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, ILR School.