Managing Human Resources:
How to create and motivate a high-performing workforce
Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior
Faculty of Economics and Business
University of Groningen
To succeed in increasingly competitive domestic and global markets, organizations must create and motivate a workforce that is able to realize competitive advantage. What type of performance is necessary to attain such an advantage is heavily dependent on the market a firm is in and the strategic choices a firm makes. Firms that operate in markets where, for example, price is the dominant performance indicator likely will opt for producing large quantities of a limited set of products or services. Standardization and repetition of work processes will contribute to high levels of efficiency, and, thus add to competitive value. Facilitating outstanding routine performance requires an appropriate management of human resources by creating structures, rules and procedures so that work across individual employees and groups can be coordinated and controlled in effective and efficient ways.
To give another example, if innovation and being innovative are prime performance indicators an organization may prefer a strategy to offer customer made products that fulfill the unique needs of individual clients. This will lead to work processes that are primarily non-routine in nature and demand creative workers. Such a firm needs a HRM policy that stimulates employees to engage in creative and innovative courses of actions that may substantially deviate from fixed patterns of work behavior. Creating a high performing and innovative organization also requires cooperation among employees who differ in their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Cooperation implies knowledge sharing, finding solutions together, learning from one another and realizing synergy in creative and innovative processes. This implies that HRM policies should focus on interpersonal relations, interdependencies and processes such as trust, learning, communication, and information exchange between employees.
In reality firms will often try to realize a complex mix of performance indicators where, for example, efficiency, innovation, quality and delivery performance may be part off. Moreover, such patterns of performance goals may vary for different departments or work units and also change over time within one and the same firm. This will result in highly diverse work settings and job designs. Consequently, organizations have to find the right balance between, for example, using rules and procedures to optimize routine work and giving employees the freedom to be creative and proactive, and, human resource policies and interventions may help to realize this balance.
Although all the staff members of our Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior have a background in social sciences, the foregoing makes clear that we operate in a Faculty of Management and Organization. Mainstream HRM research groups primarily focus on the design and effectiveness of all kinds of HRM instruments and policies and most OB oriented groups study behavior with little attention for work context. As the foregoing indicates, we much more relate these HRM policies and employee behavior to, for example, organizational strategy, work design, teamwork, task characteristics, goal setting, performance management and organizational change management. Our profile is also affected by the larger research group we are part of and in which also engineers and staff with an operations management background participate.
In all of our research projects we focus on applied research questions that address the nature and consequences of human resource policies and interventions in an organizational context. By doing so, we are able to develop new methods or interventions that will further enhance employee motivation and competencies to contribute to the performance aimed at. Our research projects take account of characteristics of the individual employees (leadership, personality, competence, commitment, learning, leadership), but also on properties of higher-level units such a dyads (dissimilarity between employees, interdependence, trust, conflict), teams (composition, coordination, performance, innovation), organizations (diversity, culture), or even groups of organizations (supply chain networks).
