In this chapter, conclusions are drawn and a discussion of possible explanations to the unexpected findings is provided. Based on the findings and conclusions, the research implications, practical implications, limitations and future research suggestions are discussed.
Conclusions
This research aimed to uncover current e-HR practices in Taiwan through qualitative exploration and a quantitative survey. Another purpose of this research is to examine the antecedents and outcomes of e-HR practices based on role theory and task complexity theory.
E-HR practices have been adopted in the HR functions for a long time. Ideally, the e-HR practices should help HR professionals deal with a variety of administrative work and reduce the time spent on repeated routine tasks (Lengnick-Hall & Moritz, 2003). The literature has suggested possible associations among the variables in the research model. This research hence attempted to confirm empirically the effects among complexity of HR expectation, task complexity, IT capability, usage of e-HR practices, HR strategic focus and HR competence.
This study found that e-HR practices in Taiwan are currently still a work-in-progress, with most of the HR tasks still processed by manual work or office software. The only exception is the administrative work concerning payroll, with the dominant and frequent usage in packaged and integrated e-HR systems. Observed from the empirical result, the benefit of e-HR system is not fully realized in Taiwan yet, except for payroll administrative work. Model testing of hypothesized relationships among antecedents and outcomes of e-HR practices found support between e-HR practices and outcomes in HR strategic focus and HR competence, but not between the antecedents and e-HR practices. However, in an alternative model, HR role complexity and IT capability were found to have direct effect on the usage of e-HR practices.
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Discussions
Some explanations were sought for the slow adoption in fully integrated e-HR systems and the lack of empirical support in using task complexity as a predictor. E-HR systems serve multi-functional needs, and thus are very expensive and require tremendous amount of time and effort when it comes to implementation (Lengnick-Hall & Moritz, 2003). Seminal works concerning the information system implementation obstacles are abundant. Salem (1998) conducted a research in Britain, surveying the obstacles that organizations confront in information system implementation phase, and 92% of the organizations responded that implementation took more time than they had originally planned. Similarly, according to Ward and Griffiths (1996), it takes a period of time – one to two years – for the impact of IT strategy implementation to take effect. That is, the expected benefit of the information system implementation is not instantaneous. The cost and the delayed benefit of IT implementation may hinder organizations’ willingness for adoption.
Sandelands (1994) provides another rationale for not implementing information system;
the inertia that prevents organizations to execute plans involving actual actions. Sandelands (1994) points out that people underestimate the effort that is needed to overcome the inertia, such as commitment, time, emotion, and energy. Salem (1998) supports this statement with empirical data; 83% of the organization concurred that competing activities would distract attention from information system implementation decision. Similarly, Thong (2001) indicates that the information system suffered from a lack of the organizational support and resources; organizations often fail to support the information system implementation project.
Inertia delays organizations’ reaction to internal needs for process improvement, thus task complexity within HR department may have minimal bearings on organizations’ decision to adopt more advanced systems. Consequently, implementation of a fully integrated e-HR system may not receive sufficient organizational support.
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The other possible explanation is that the legacy systems are still in use.
Panayotopoulou et al. (2010) conducted a research to understand how the national context would affect the usage of e-HR system, using data from 13 different European countries. The empirical result indicates that some countries are early adopters of information technology for their management needs; these legacy information systems are still functional and in use. The switching cost may be too much for some organizations to handle and therefore they opted to continue using the early e-HR systems which were not fully integrated.
The above discussion shows some companies do not adopt the more advanced information technology simply because of increasing HR role complexity and task complexity; more factors shall be taken into account. On the other hand, the result confirms the effect of e-HR practices on the outcome variables, which provides empirical support to the literature on the benefit of e-HR adoption to increase HR strategic focus and HR competence.
Research Implications
With the constant business environment changes, the enterprises now seek for instant response using the human resource information system. However, the current status of the development on human resource information system and its actual usages were rarely explored in Taiwan. Thus, this research contributes to the knowledge of current practices by collecting 182 organizational responses and generating an overall understanding of the e-HR practices in Taiwan.
The survey questionnaire on e-HR practices went through a series of validation. Starting with a western conceptualization (Haines & Lafleur, 2008), the questionnaire was reviewed by field experts and examined in a focus group interview in Taiwan. A new scale was also developed to help the researcher better distinguish the level of automation in each e-HR practice, from no practice, manual work, office software, packaged software, to fully
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integrated systems. As a result, this study was able to gain more in-depth understanding of e-HR practices not only from a task coverage standpoint, but also from the perspective of the complexity of IT used.
In addition, this research aimed to empirically test the effect of selected antecedents and outcome variables derived from the literature, using a more stringent method. The PLS SEM method provides rigorous tests of the validity and reliability of study variables before final model testing. Thus, the result of the model testing can be considered more believable.
The only relationship that did not gain support in either the theorized model or the alternative model was that between task complexity and e-HR adoption. Since the measurement used in this research for task complexity contained two dimensions: task repetitiveness and task analyzability, there is reason to believe that these two dimensions may not work the same way on their relationship with e-HR adoption. More research on this aspect is needed to clarify the effect of different characteristics of tasks.
Scholars in the HR field may be interested in the phenomenon of e-HR practice and its outcome variable. Since the empirical data indicates that the e-HR practices have positive effects on HR professionals’ strategic focus and competence, the implication for the field expert is to explore the relationship further concerning how e-HR practices affect HR professionals’ strategic focus and competence.
The other implication for scholars is the respondents from campus recruitment activities As they serve primarily in the recruiting function and have relatively shorter tenure with the company, these respondents may not be able to answer all the items on the research questionnaire. However, this channel is good concerning its accessibility to organizational sample. Therefore, if a research targets at relatively new HR professional workers or about recruiting function, the campus recruitment activities may still be a good channel to collect data.
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Practical Implications
This research carries different meanings to different stakeholders. Thus, for this section, the implications will be discussed from the different stakeholders’ perspective: companies, HR department, HR professionals, and IT vendors.
For companies, the research result offers a benchmark to evaluate the current companies’
e-HR information system against common practices. When companies are considering implementing new information system, the research offers empirical evidence of the types of e-HR functions that are mostly adopted in Taiwan. Also, in addition to productivity and efficiency gain from automation, this research proves that the adoption of more advanced e-HR systems will enhance HR department’s competence and strategic focus. These should be considered when calculating the return on investment for a new e-HR system.
For HR departments striving to become a strategic partner of their organizations, the use of more advanced or integrated e-HR system shall be advocated. As the research shows, most Taiwanese companies are adopting office software as the major system or platform for use in human resource functions. This may be an indication that many human resource departments are still spending most of their time on administrative and routine tasks. The use of more integrated human resource systems should alleviate HR personnel from these time-consuming and less value-added routines so they can concentrate on more strategic tasks.
For HR professionals, they should recognize the fact that information technology application in human resource is indeed important (Lengnick-Hall & Moritz, 2003;
Panayotopoulou et al., 2007), especially in enhancing the capability of HR as a strategic partner. Successful implementation and utilization of e-HR system is only possible when HR professionals are fully aware of the capability of current available technology. Thus, to add value to the organization, human resource professionals shall become more technology-savvy.
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For IT vendors, a well-developed E-HR platform can benefit the organization in two ways: enhancing the capability of HR professional as a strategic partner and to increase the HR competence. This research can be cited as evidence for IT vendors to persuade companies or HR departments to move to better E-HR platforms in order to focus on more value-added work for the company. As one of the results of this research is a current inventory of E-HR practices adopted by Taiwanese companies, it also provides IT vendors valuable input for their product development focus in e-HR solutions.
Limitations
The research aimed to collect responses from HR professionals. Due to accessibility reason, the researcher solicited participation from HR professionals mainly during campus recruitment activities. The HR professionals attending these activities tended to be relatively new in their respective companies and more competent in recruiting. Therefore, data collected from these HR professionals may not be representative of the entire HR professional community. Moreover, the questionnaires were collected on the scene during campus recruiting activities in which interruptions occurred often. This may introduce some unnecessary errors in data collection. Finally, common method variance (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003) may be a concern since the researcher used the single-informant approach to collect all the data for this research using a survey questionnaire which the respondents filled out and returned at once.
In addition, the questionnaire contains several variables and lengthy questionnaire items.
The HR professionals may be reluctant to answer the questions seriously. Therefore, multiple responses from the same companies were collected and reverse-coded items were used to screen the data. From the multiple responses, this research selected the most representative response using the following criteria: 1) human resource working experience, 2) seniority in the company, 3) functional content, and 4) computer literacy. The screening and selection
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reduced the sample size greatly to 182 companies. The small number of companies in the analysis is another limitation of the study.
Future Research Suggestions
Several suggestions for future research are organized as follows. First of all, the campus recruitment activities are more suitable for recruiting. Therefore, future research may consider approaching the companies in campus recruitment activities for topics more related to recruiting.
Second, the antecedents of e-HR practices tested in this research were not supported by empirical data. Therefore, the factors that affect the implementation and executions of e-HR adoption shall be explored. The possible antecedents for future research are suggested; these are factors such as organizational culture (Panayotopoulou et al., 2007), organizational support (Thong, 2001), support from information technology department, information technology implementation planning time (Salem, 1998) and information technology investment.
Third, the comparatively low explanatory power (R2) of the last part of the model indicates that other factors may have a larger influence on these outcome variables. Future research can adopt different factors concerning the outcome variables, such as HR department efficiency and employee satisfaction.
Fourth, the alternative way of observing the implementation of e-HR system may be the other future research possibility. The longitudinal research approach can better explore the factors of antecedents and outcome variables in the research context of e-HR practices.
Last but not the least, ways to reduce common method variance is strongly recommended. Archival data should be retrieved or obtained concerning organizational information, such as HR departmental performance; or to use the actual organizational performance, earning per share (EPS) as the outcome variable. Future research may consider
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digging into the different approaches to explore the full possibilities of different data collection methods.
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