This chapter introduces the background, rationale, research questions, objectives and definition of each variable of this study. The background focuses on describing the current workforce and two important human resource practices due to the change of economy. The rationale provides the reasons for conducting this study. Finally, research questions and objectives of the study are addressed.
Background of the Study
One of the prominent features in the 21st century is the wide application of IT innovation in business (Panayotopoulou, Vakola, & Galanaki, 2007), and IT application in human resource is no exception (Mishra & Akman, 2010; Strohmeier & Kabst, 2009). E-HR system has been helpful to leverage organizational resources. E-HR system can contribute to HR professionals in many perspectives, such as streamlining the administrative processes, lowering the HR costs on administration, competing effectively for talents from the globe, improving accessibility to employees and managers in organization, providing timely information for decision makers and enabling HR professionals to transform themselves into a more strategy-focused in business (Johnson & Gueuta, 2011).
Earlier in the late 1990, literatures have been settled on the strategic need to strategic human resource management. The necessity for strategic human resource management to meet organizational challenges has brought the necessary change. Ulrich (1997) proclaims that technology should be helpful to shift human resource management role from transactional activities into transformative activities. The role of strategic planning has been expected to deprive more time from human resource (HR) professionals in the future.
Meanwhile, the urgency to maintain transactional activities does not shrink or disappear.
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Thus, information technology has been cited as one of the dominant forces driving HR to transition from purely personnel administrator to multiple roles (Bell, Lee, & Yeung, 2006;
Huub, Tanya, & Jan Kees, 2004) with additional expectation to guide organization to change (Ulrich, 1997).
Traditionally, the role of human resource (HR) department was regarded as the legal compliance, payroll and personnel data maintainer. Later in the historical revolution of human resource management (HRM), human resource department was demanded and urged to add values to organizations, and thus created additional roles and responsibility to HR department and staffs. The new roles for HR to fulfill are company’s strategic partner, change agent and employee advocate (Panayotopoulou et al., 2007; Ulrich, 1997). To perform the additional roles, tasks and responsibilities, human resource department hence turns to human resource information technology for solutions.
The automation in the HR transactional activities has streamlined the process and saved time for human resource department (Dulebohn & Marler, 2005). Originally, HR department needed to do single task in specific single function, such as payroll or record keeping. Later in the development HR professionals are given more help to deal with multiple tasks in the organization through technological innovation, outsourcing and off-shore activities. Hence, organizations require more from the human resource professionals than before. As the electronic automation has been applied to a variety of HR practices, more are advocating for HR automation on the basis of improved productivity, which has been proven valid (Kovach
& Cathcart, 1999).
With increasing emphasis on human resource management in corporations, the human resource department is urged to perform additional roles, implementing a variety of tasks and processing massive amount of data. All of these happen while information technology
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manages to change employees’ life and facilitates organizational changes. Once technology changes the organization, the structure and the people in it will have to change as well. This makes understanding the antecedents and consequences of e-HR adoption an important issue.
The possible competence change following technology-enabled organizational change is also crucial for the HR professionals to detect in order to reinforce the key successful factors that lead to positive outcomes.
Problem Statement
E-HR refers to HR transactions using the internet along with other technologies (Lengnick-Hall & Moritz, 2003; Panayotopoulou et al., 2007). Strohmeier and Kabst (2009) theorized three potential advantages of e-HR adoption – (1) automation of routine asks, which promises advantages in costs, time, and quality of HR processes, (2) information in planning and control, which enables a more strategic orientation of HRM, and (3) collaboration between HR and other stakeholders, which leads to more innovative ways of organizing HRM. Many scholars also agreed that e-HR leads to considerable organizational changes and therefore should be regarded as an important strategic initiative in the HR field (Lengnick-Hall & Moritz, 2003; Lepak & Snell, 1998). However, whether e-HR actually yields these potential advantages or not is an open question to be answered empirically.
Empirical and anecdotal evidences have shown that firms adopt e-HR to a varying degree (Mishra & Akman, 2010; Panayotopoulou, Galanaki, & Papalexandris, 2010;
Panayotopoulou et al., 2007; Strohmeier & Kabst, 2009). Attempts to understand the factors of adoption thus become a popular research interest among HR and IT academics. However, as Strohmeier and Kabst (2009) pointed out the few findings on factors of e-HR system adoption are rather scattered and inconsistent; the only consistent determinant of adoption is the organizational size (Ball, 2001; Thompson S.H. Teo, Lim, & Fedric, 2007). Furthermore,
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some literatures have investigated the outcomes of e-HR consequences (Leidner, Preston, &
Chen, 2010; Strohmeier, 2007), such as individual consequences (Voermans & Veldhoven, 2007), operational consequences, relational consequences and transformational consequences.
Despite the great volume of theoretical foundations on the technological influence on HRM, little empirical evidence has suggested to link the e-HR adoption antecedents with the e-HR adoption outcomes. As a result, the necessity to empirically examine the antecedents of e-HR adoption and link the potential e-HR adoption outcome is thus generated.
Furthermore, scholars from the field of contextualism argue that e-HR application is exposed to cross-national differences, as in many HR activities (Brewster, Mayrhofer, &
Morley, 2004; Strohmeier & Kabst, 2009). Under the influence of globalization, e-HR systems development in Taiwan is interesting, relevant and timely. First, the developing countries in Asia can refer Taiwan as an indicator to forecast the technological advancement upcoming. Second, the technological influence on the workers in non-western culture is also noticeable since Taiwan has a great reputation for information technology design and manufacturing. Third, as a non-western culture, different language and cultural usage in the e-HR adoption might cause other effects.
While both researchers and practitioners have argued that firms should adopt IT innovations to alleviate administrative burdens of the HR department (Kovach & Cathcart, 1999), some firms lag behind in adopting e-HR innovations. The exploration of the factors causing the variance of the e-HR application remains an important phenomenon of interest.
Still, there is a lack of theory-driven empirical research that systematically investigates the factors that possibly influence a company’s strategic choice to adopt e-HR and the influence of e-HR on firm performance. This study attempts to bridge the existing gap by using role expectation theory and task complexity theory to explain the e-HR adoption phenomenon and
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the possible linkage with HR professional’s outcome assessment. Since HR professionals facilitate and use the e-HR systems, they are expected to be the best source to understand the process and rationale for examining e-HR adoption antecedents and outcomes. This study hence chose representatives from companies as the source of data to examine potential association in departmental level.
Objectives of Study
The study adopted HR role complexity and task complexity as the antecedents of e-HR practices. Also, the changes in HR’s competence and the shift to strategic focus are to be addressed as the possible outcomes of e-HR practices.
Therefore, with the purpose of understanding the adoption of e-HR practices and its antecedents and consequences, three research objectives are listed as follows:
1) Empirically test HR departmental strategic focus and competence as the departmental level outcome of e-HR practice.
2) Empirically test role complexity and task complexity as the antecedents of e-HR adoption.
3) Empirically test IT capability as the moderator of the relationship between the antecedents and e-HR adoption.
The study hopes to contribute to e-HR workplace application. HR professionals, as one of the major direct stakeholders, can be a great source to collect the data from. Therefore, the main source to collect the variables associated with the e-HR application lies greatly in the HR professional. The research further analyzes the relevant factors and variables once the data collection complete.
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Research Questions
Derived from the purposes stated above, the research questions are hence addressed to investigate and analyze e-HR application usage and its antecedents and possible outcomes in departmental level.
Though many scholars have addressed the importance for human resource professionals to adopt electronic human resource systems for better strategic focus (Brockbank, 1999;
Lengnick-Hall & Moritz, 2003; Panayotopoulou et al., 2007; Ulrich, 1997), some companies have not applied extensive e-HR practices yet. However, limited literature has shed light on the phenomenon. For human resource professionals, information technology will assist in reducing the time devoted to routine work and thus will be able to gain better recognition by focusing more on the company’s competitive advantage. Therefore, the researcher intended to fill the gap on the antecedents and outcomes of the e-HR application by analyzing the relationship in departmental level. In order to understand the relationship among the complexity of HR role expectation, task complexity, IT capability, the usage of e-HR practices and departmental outcomes, the following questions are investigated.
1. Does complexity of role expectation of HR department predict the usage of e-HR practices?
2. Does task complexity of HR department predict the usage of e-HR practices?
3. Does IT capability affect the relationship between complexity of HR role expectation and the usage of e-HR practices, as well as that between task complexity and the usage of e-HR practices?
4. Does the usage of e-HR practices contribute to HR departmental strategic focus?
5. Does the usage of e-HR practices contribute to HR departmental competence?
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Limitation and Delimitation
First of all, the data collection is delimited to HR practitioners working in different companies in Taiwan as the source to gather data and later analyze the potential relationships among variables. Therefore, the non-human resource professional shall be excluded from the survey and shall not be the research subject in the research. Second, the research intended to study the relationships among complexity of HR role expectation, task complexity, IT capability, the usage of e-HR practices and HR departmental outcomes. Third, the research aims to study the variables using the concept of the electronic human resource application.
Therefore, the other factors, such as the non-electronic human resource efficiency or possible outcomes, shall not be considered in the research framework.
Due to the accessibility of our sample, multi-source data collection was used for the researcher to obtain response. Method such as sending requests through HR forums in the internet or BBS, requesting to fill out the questionnaire in campus recruitment activities, distributing the questionnaire through networking and collecting questionnaires from in-service master program were adopted. As a result, the research did not use the random sampling technique and thus representativeness of the research sample is a limitation in the research.
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