Flexible HR Practice

Abstract

Research on the concept of ‘flexibility’ has produced a substantive scholarly in recent decades and has evolved as a focal area of management research (Monsted 1991; Sushil 1994; Skipper et al. 2014; Krishna et al. 2015). According to Sushil (2001) ‘Flexibility offers freedom of choice and is highly context specific’. Here, ‘context specific’ refers to the role of contingencies within flexibility which might render it as a form of a firm’s dynamic capability. The dynamic capability scholarship argues that in order to achieve excellence, organizations should develop capabilities complementary to their competencies (Teece et al. 1997; Helfat and Peteraf 2009). Thus, flexible HR practices can help organizations in achieving sustainable competitiveness through creating, integrating, reconfiguring, and building on its human resource base. For example, organizations can achieve competitive edge by customizing training and development programs. Conventionally, flexibility has had a comparatively peripheral presence in human resource and organizational behavior research. Although, some pockets of research are able to be evidenced on a few areas related to HRM, for example: behavioral flexibility (Lindberg and Kaiser 2004), managerial/people flexibility (Jones et al. 2006; Verdu and Gomez-Gras 2009; Bamel et al. 2013, 2014), flexible pay structure (Riley and Lockwood 1997), labor flexibility (Karuppan 2004; Mihail 2004) and flexible human resource deployment (Forrier and Sels 2003), in general, this area is marginalized. In contrast, a wide span of HR functions and practices such as: flexible recruitment and selection, flexible career and succession planning, flexible pay structure, creating organizational structure and design which incorporate flexible HR practices have received considerably less attention. This special issue is therefore timely and this is underpinned by Prof. Sushil, Editor-In-Chief, Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, who has commented (2015):