A contingency framework for the delivery of HR practices

Abstract

Existing arguments suggest that Human Resource (HR) departments should deliver in-house the HR practices that are core to their competitiveness and outsource those HR practices that are peripheral to their primary objectives. While intuitively appealing, researchers and practitioners have been slow to define exactly which HR practices are core and/or peripheral. In this paper we explore factors that influence this distinction. Specifically, we discuss how a firm's strategic orientation and the HR function's primary orientation influence the relative importance of HR practices to a firm's competitiveness. We then discuss operational factors that influence the feasibility as well as likelihood that different delivery options (e.g, in-house versus external) will be utilized by HR departments. We focus on factors pertaining to the availability of different options, HR activity related factors, the role of integrated access to information technology, and the external environment in this analysis. We then discuss theoretical and practical implications of using different delivery options within HR.