Abstract
There are a growing number of studies describing developments in the labour market, in employer-employee relationships, and in individual careers in a very similar way. The discussion about work force flexibility and the challenges for HRM to handle scattered arrangements is often justified by a growing complexity caused by the driving forces of globalization, virtualization, demographic developments or changes in values. However, so far there is no empirical evidence for that complexity hypothesis in individual careers. The primary aim of this article is to approach the complexity hypothesis of career research on the basis of a sound definition for complexity and to test the complexity hypothesis for data from the Vienna Career Panel Project.
Highlights
Strategic management inevitably involves forethought and planning (Mintzberg 1994/2000), which is an easy task in an ordered and predictable environment, but becomes increasingly difficult in an unstable, turbulent and complex world
There is a similar line of argumentation in the context of the so-called “make-orbuy” decision in human resource management (HRM)
The “make-or-buy” decision is one of the core questions in human resource management (Miles/Snow 1984): Is it better to develop human capital internally or to purchase it on the external labour market? “ the make-or-buy distinction is admittedly simplistic, the growing number of subtle variations on this theme makes the effective management of employment at once more complicated and more directly related to organizational effectiveness” (Lepak/Snell 1999: 31)
Summary
Strategic management inevitably involves forethought and planning (Mintzberg 1994/2000), which is an easy task in an ordered and predictable environment, but becomes increasingly difficult in an unstable, turbulent and complex world. An influential model, developed by Lepak and Snell (1999), is based on transaction cost economics (Coase 1937; Williamson 1975), human capital theory (Becker 1964), and the resource-based view of the firm (Prahalad/Hamel 1990; Barney 1991) Key variables of their so-called “HR architecture” are the uniqueness of human capital and its value for the organization, which leads to the following assumption: unique human capital with a high value for the organization has to be developed internally, while human capital of low value and little uniqueness can be purchased from the external labour market. The strategic HRM architecture, as developed by Lepak and Snell (1999), is theoretically sound and of practical importance, it is unable to handle those uncertainties
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