A Lack of Commitment: An Event History Analysis of Strategic Human Resource Practices

Abstract

Strategic human resource management (SHRM) systems represent a substantial commitment on the part of an organization, a fundamental choice about how work will be organized. The performance benefits of SHRM practices have been well established (Boselie, Dietz and Boon, 2005, Combs, Liu, Hall and Ketchen, 2006), but little is known of how organizations use SHRM practices over time. This study takes advantage of a large-scale longitudinal study of management practices among Canadian firms to provide insight into the use of SHRM practices over time and the role of managers in maintaining them. Using event history analysis, I determined a ‘hazard’ function that shows very high rates of SHRM practice abandonment. More than half of respondents abandoned a bundle of high-involvement work practices in less than 4 years. Cox regression analyses indicate that organizational support in the form of explicit people strategies and provision of HR expertise lower the hazard rate, but manager training had no significant effect. This finding of high rates of abandonment raises problematic questions for both the study and practice of Human Resources.