According to the data analysis, this chapter summarizes the conclusions of the findings of this study. The research and practical implications, limitations and suggestions for future research were also discussed in this section.
Conclusions
To conclude, the present study is an explorative research on the antecedents and outcomes of e-HR practice usage. A major finding is that not all the proposed antecedents affect a company’s tendency to adopt e-HR practices, and the firm-level outcomes of e-HR practices are not easy to prove. To answer the first research question, what is the possible relationship between competitive tension and the usage of a firm’s e-HR practices, the result indicates that competitive tension does not seem to drive company to adopt more extensive e-HR practices. Since the number of companies in the same industry was used as a measure of competitive tension, the result means that no matter how many companies are in the same industry, it does not seem to affect the usage of e-HR practices. It can be reasoned that the density dependence model only reveals part of the competitive tension in an industry. But it remains unresolved whether a different measure of competitive tension may show influence on usage of e-HR practices.
The second question to answer is what the possible relationship between strategic leadership and the usage of a firm’s e-HR is. As expected, the result indicates that as company executives are more strategic thinking, the higher the possibility an organization will apply more e-HR practices. The third question seeks to examine what is the possible relationship between IT capability and the usage of a firm’s e-HR, and the result is similar to question two. The findings indicate the IT capability is a significant factor to lead companies
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to apply more e-HR practices.
The last question to answer is what the possible relationship between the usage of e-HR and organization outcomes is. The findings indicate that the usage of e-HR practices predicts the increase of one organizational financial performance, the EPS, but not the ROA. The e-HR practices also fail to predict HR efficiency which is measured with the employee to human resource personnel ratio.
Discussion
Through testing all the hypotheses, some of them are supported. As expected, the strategic leadership has positive influence on e-HR practices. It can be explained that a strong leader could influence subordinates’ willingness to use new technologies. This finding is in agreement with researches that the strategic leadership was viewed as the critical factor to form a company’s internal environment (Cannella, Finkelstein, & Hambrick, 2009), and the other study that the chief information officer (CIO) strategic leadership and top management team’s attitude toward IT had positive influence on IT innovation use (Leidner, Preston, &
Chen, 2010).
Moreover, the IT capability has positive influence on e-HR practices. It can be reasoned that the relationship between IT and HR users and how IT department maintains a stable system are critical factors to make HR and IT work better together. With regard to key success factors in e-HR adoption and utilization, the findings confirm the agreements that the collaboration of HR and IT is a key success factor in using e-HR and this collaboration leads company to ensure the quality of HRM services (Panayotopoulou et al., 2007).
However, it was found that competitive tension has no positive influence on usage of e-HR practices. One possible reason for the lack of statistical significance may lie in the operational definition of competitive tension. In the present study, the competitive tension is
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measured by the number of company in an industry which only represents a partial picture of competitive tension. Thus, it might lead to the bias when measuring competitive tension.
Furthermore, another possible reason may be that most of the listed companies in Taiwan are in manufacturing industry, so the sample size among different industry sector might influence the statistical outcome.
With regard to the HR efficiency, the hypotheses is not supported, a possible explanation for this is that when a company decides to invest on e-HR software or related practices, the company is paying more attention to HR function, thus, it may hire more HR personnel to deal with increased activities after adopting e-HR practices. The findings provide evidence against the assumption of Lepak and Snell (1998) that company may downsize HR staff to realize the benefit of efficiency by putting investments in technology. It also goes against another argument that when company becomes larger, the uses of IT are also increased to deal with increased activities of coordination, and the organization size could be further decreased by reducing extra coordination within company operation (Im, Grover, & Teng, 2013). However, it is difficult to measure how long it will take to reduce inner coordination by using IT tools.
As for e-HR’s effect on the financial performance, only EPS was shown to be a significant outcome of e-HR practices. Although the ROA and EPS are widely used as organizational outcomes, these two factors are easily influenced by external economic environment, such as the industry cycle or global economic cycle. Therefore, it remains unclear to realize the possible impact of e-HR practices on organization financial performance.
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Research Implications
For conducting this type of research, it is important to take country background and organization context into consideration. Since Taiwan is famous for its information technology development, organizations are more willing to invest on latest electronic system or IT innovation, thus, these premises are critical when conducting research on electronic information system use in a country. In addition, the selection of antecedents and outcomes are important, because e-HR adoption might be influenced by many factors. The present findings contribute to the field’s understanding of the various forces acting on the adoption of e-HR practice. One such force is the technology-organization-environment framework toward the antecedents of e-HR adoption. Since this study is a cross-sectional research, thus, the antecedents should be able to present a long term phenomena of three aspects based on TOE framework. In addition, the outcome information were collected during the years 2012 and 2013, the information might not presented the complete situation at the time of e-HR adoption. Hence, the selection of variables and the access for information will be important for future research.
Another issue is about the organization outcomes, the objective measures were used for predicting performance in this study. However, not all the financial indicators are appropriate to examine the impact to companies after adopting e-HR system. Previous literature mentioned the productivity gains due to the automation of routine activities (Strohmeier, 2007), thus, a financial indicator which can predict the productivity gains would be considered as a better indicator in this type of research. Therefore, future researchers could think about alternative indicator to predict productivity change, or conduct longitudinal studies to better explain the phenomena after using e-HR system.
Finally, although the researcher tried to avoid the bias during data collection, the low response rate may cause the result not generalizable to all companies in Taiwan. Future
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researchers can enlarge the research scope and find a better way to increase response rate to decrease possible statistical bias.
Practical Implications
This research provides various meanings to stakeholders like companies, HR department, and IT vendors.
For companies, the findings indicates the strategic thinking of top management team will drive companies to adopt e-HR information system, and the empirical evidence shows the number of HR personnel may not decrease after implementing e-HR software. Namely, if company wants to get the benefit of downsizing HR department by using automation system, it may not work. On the contrary, company may redeploy HR staff into other roles or onto other activities to offer more value to the organization or being more strategic as a business partner (Parry, 2011). Thus, the number of HR personnel may not decrease when company wants HR professionals to provide more value-added performance.
For HR department, the findings indicate many of the existent HR practices are performed by using office software. Thus, current HR professionals might spend lots of time dealing with administrative and routine tasks. To accelerate the work process or pay more attention on strategic tasks, the HR department could cooperate with IT department to develop an e-HR system or implement an e-HR system from outside IT vendors. Moreover, the EPS performance is a visible benefit which may help HR departments to sell e-HR information system in their company.
For IT vendors, the findings indicate that companies adopt different degrees of e-HR practices. It means that IT vendors may not have designed a well-developed e-HR packaged or integrated software yet to benefit the HR department to deal with human professionals tasks. However, the results indicate the e-HR practices can benefit organization to enhance
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organization performance, especially in earning per share (EPS). Thus, it would be a good advantage for IT vendors to persuade companies or HR departments to implement a better e-HR software to focus on more value-added tasks.
Research Limitations
Although the present study has yielded findings that have both theoretical and practical implications, its design is not without restrictions. The first limitation is that the sample of the study only focused on listed companies in Taiwan. While, other kinds of companies like non-listed company or foreign company might also use e-HR practices; especially most of the foreign companies in Taiwan adopt state-of-art e-HR systems. However, these companies were not included in the research sample. Thus, the result could not be generalized to all types of companies in Taiwan.
Secondly, scores of two antecedents of e-HR adoption and e-HR practices are self- reported by same participants, which may raise the concern of common method bias.
Therefore, in order to avoid the common method bias, the data of competitive tension and consequences are collect by secondary information.
Third, many companies in this research have implemented e-HR software for a wide range of years. Thus, most of the participants lacked the knowledge to provide information before company adopted e-HR practices. Thus, data for antecedents of e-HR practices are difficult to collect. Moreover, some of the measures may not accurately represent the variables in question, like competitive tension and HR efficiency, since the information is hard to collect and calculate.
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Future Research Suggestions
In this section, several suggestions are provided for future research in this field. First of all, the antecedents and outcomes of using e-HR practices are still very much in the experimental stage and deserve future research. Thus, the following suggestions are provided for future research.
First of all, future researchers can consider different ways to operationalize some of the variables. For competitive tension, previous research used Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) which applies the idea of market share of company as a statistical tool to present the industry competition. In addition, the awareness-motivation-capability perspective could be other choice to apply in research to detect perceived competitive tension (Chen, SU, & Tsai, 2007).
Second, the low explanatory power (R square) of e-HR practices and outcome variables is an indication that other factors may have more influence on the outcome variables. Future research can adopt different factors such as the time-saving after implementing e-HR practices or employee satisfaction toward the e-HR platform.
Third, the advantages of implementing e-HR practices may require longer observation to see the effect. Thus, a longitudinal research is more appropriate, compared to cross-sectional research.
Last but not least, the result indicates that the adoption of electronic human resource system do not seem to decrease number of HR personnel, which is against the universal understanding. Thus, more research and empirical evidences are needed to add more knowledge on the consequences of using IT tools.
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