Assignment: Capella University Keeping Momentum Going While Implementing Change Paper
Assignment: Capella University Keeping Momentum Going While Implementing Change Paper
Assignment: Capella University Keeping Momentum Going While Implementing Change Paper
Question Description
Human Resources: Keeping Momentum
Having Trouble Meeting Your Deadline?
Get your assignment on Assignment: Capella University Keeping Momentum Going While Implementing Change Paper completed on time. avoid delay and – ORDER NOW
One of the biggest challenges for leaders is to keep momentum going while implementing change. Particularly when the culture of an organization is strong, it can be quite difficult to fully implement the change before the momentum disappears. Sustaining momentum is therefore critical, or employees will eventually go back into their “old ways.” Some leaders are too quick to move on to the next challenge without making sure that the change is embedded in the culture, people, and structure of the organization. In other words, you must make sure that all parts of the organization are aligned with the new strategy.
Respond to the following, in a 2-3 page paper:
Struggling to Meet Your Deadline?
Get your assignment on Assignment: Capella University Keeping Momentum Going While Implementing Change Paper done on time by medical experts. Don’t wait – ORDER NOW!
Why do you think many new changes at the organizational level quickly fizzle out?
What do you think is most important for HR professionals to know in order to avoid this?
Be specific, and provide examples with references to the literature.
BY DAY 7
Resources:
Gardner, T. M., & Wright, P. M. (2009). Implicit human resource management theory: A potential threat to the internal validity of human resource practice measures. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 20(1), 57–74.
Kotter, J. P. (2005). Change leadership. Leadership Excellence, 22(12), 3–4.
Maxwell, G. G., & Beattie, D. R. (2004). The ethics of in-company research: An exploratory study. Journal of Business Ethics, 52(3), 243–256.
ORDER NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT: Assignment: Capella University Keeping Momentum Going While Implementing Change Paper
attachment_1
Implicit human resource management theory: a potential threat to the
internal validity of human resource practice measures
Timothy M. Gardnera
* and Patrick M. Wrightb
a
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA; b
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Since the publication of Huselid’s (1995) paper examining the relationship between HR
practices and firm performance, there has been an explosion of published papers examining
the empirical relationship between HR practices and various measures of firm performance.
This study examines the possibility that informants typically providing data about
organizational HR practices may be biased by an implicit theory of human resource
management. Our findings suggest the responses from subjects typically providing data about
HR practices may be biased in their reporting by the performance of the organization.
The generalizability of these results is considered and implications for future studies of the
HR-firm performance relationship reviewed.
Keywords: construct validity; mental models; research methods; strategic human resource
management
Recent research in the field of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) has explored
the substance and impact of organizational human resource strategies. This research has
examined both the impact of individual HR practices on firm outcomes, such as compensation
(Gerhart and Milkovich 1990) and employee selection (Terpstra and Rozell 1993), and the effect
of sets of human resource practices on firm performance (Huselid 1995; MacDuffie 1995; Delery
and Doty 1996; Ichniowski, Shaw and Prennushi 1997; Ngo, Turban, Lau and Lui 1998; Shaw,
Delery, Jenkins and Gupta 1998; Hoque 1999; Guthrie 2001; Paul and Anantharaman 2003).
This stream of research has documented statistically and practically significant relationships
between various measures of human resource practices and business unit and/or firm outcomes.
Effect sizes in these studies typically indicate that a one standard deviation increase in the
use/quality of a set HRM practices is associated with approximately a 20% increase in profits
(return on assets) (Becker and Huselid 1998; Gerhart, Wright, McMahan and Snell 2000b;
Paauwe and Boselie 2005).
While extremely promising, this research, with few exceptions, has relied on survey
responses from one knowledgeable informant per company to measure the content and quality of
firms’ human resource management systems. Reliance on just one informant makes the
measurement of the human resource management construct susceptible to excessive random (i.e.,
unreliability) and systematic (i.e., bias) measurement error. Research by Gerhart (1999), Gehart
et al. (2000b) and Gerhart, Wright and McMahan (2000a) points to the potentially problematic
nature of the construct validity of measures of HR practices, particularly with regard to random
measurement error. Gerhart et al. (2000a) replicated a typical SHRM study and estimated that
ICC(1,1), a measure of the reliability of a single informant, to be 0.16; significantly lower than
Nunnally and Bernstein’s (1994) recommended minimum of .70. Wright et al. (2001a) examined
ISSN 0958-5192 print/ISSN 1466-4399 online
q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09585190802528375
http://www.informaworld.com
*Corresponding author. Email: tim.gardner@vanderbilt.edu
The International Journal of Human Resource Management,
Vol. 20, No. 1, January 2009, 57–74
the interrater reliability of HR practice measures using data from three different SHRM studies
and observed an average item ICC(1,1) of 0.25.
Thus, every study that has examined measurement error in measures of HR practices has
demonstrated that significant amounts exist, particularly when the measure is taken from a single
respondent. Random measurement error leads to a downward bias in observed relationships.
If the bulk of the measurement error is random, this would imply that the ‘true’ impact of HR
practices on firm financial outcomes may be significantly greater than current empirical research
suggests. However, the measurement of human resource constructs is also susceptible to
systematic measurement error. Systematic error is a consistent bias in a measure, and it can
either inflate or deflate an observed relationship. This type of error may occur if respondents
report HR practices based not on accurate and valid estimates, but rather based on an implicit
theory of human resource management. For example, an implicit theory that high performing
firms are engaged in progressive HR practices while low performing firms are not engaged in
such practices, if it affects subjects’ responses to HR surveys, could produce an artificially high
correlation between HR practices and firm performance. However, to date, no empirical data
exists suggesting that respondents might hold such an implicit theory, nor that this implicit
theory might impact their responses.
Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine if one form of systematic bias, implicit human
resource management theory, can impact measures of HR practices. We seek to answer two
specific questions; (1) Do typical respondents to HR practice surveys in a field setting hold
implicit theories regarding the nature of human resource practices? (2) Can implicit theories
affect how research subjects describe organizational human resource practices? In order to
answer these questions we first review the theoretical rationale and empirical evidence for the
impact of implicit theories on subjects’ responses in other areas of management research.
Review of the literature
Implicit theories and their impact in organizational research
The most commonly considered form of systematic bias in organizational research is perceptpercept inflation. Percept-percept inflation results when subjects provide information for the
independent and dependent variables at the same point in time (Gerhart 1999). This type of bias
is less of a threat to the research on HR practices and firm performance because, with only a few
notable exceptions (see, for example, Delaney and Huselid 1996; Bae and Lawler 2000; Guthrie
2001), most of the major SHRM studies have collected information regarding firm performance
from a source different than the respondent providing information regarding HR practices.
However, a second, and less frequently considered possible source of systematic bias is the
implicit theories of the informants. Informants, such as researchers, have implicit theories of
human resource management. As organizational research is rarely fully counterintuitive,
informant theories of HRM are likely quite similar to researchers’ theories (Staw 1975). When
responding regarding the characteristics of the organization on a survey, implicit theories may
bias the recall of information in a way consistent with the theory the researcher is trying to test.
Below we examine the theory underlying the role of implicit theories in organizational research.
Attribution theory and implicit theories
Attribution theory (Kelly 1973) attempts to explain how people make causal explanations of the
world around them and the consequences of these beliefs on behavior. The theory assumes that
all individuals behave as naı¨ve scientists seeking to understand the causes of salient outcomes.
Possible causes that appear to covary with the effect of interest over time are attributed as likely
58 T.M. Gardner and P.M. Wright
causes of the effect. The final choice of a cause or causes is based on the subject’s experience in
observing cause-and-effect relationships, quasi-experiments in which subjects manipulate
possible causal factors, and from implicit and explicit teachings of the causal nature of the world
(Kelly 1973, p. 115).
There is a strong conceptual basis for believing that implicit theories affect the responses
subjects provide in management research. Completing a survey for management research
involves a complex sequence of information processing events. Whether providing objective
information or subjective evaluations, subjects must be exposed to the stimulus of interest,
attend to the stimulus, encode, and store the information. There is usually a gap between the time
the information is stored and retrieved for the purpose of completing a survey. Once retrieved
from memory, the information is recorded on the questionnaire. It is unlikely informants encode,
store, and retrieve the desired information with perfect accuracy. Even in the absence of memory
decay, the entire process poses substantial information processing demands. To reduce these
demands, subjects rely on implicit theories to cue the salient information, structure it into
coherence, and fill in gaps of missing information (Rush, Thomas and Lord 1977). Thus, when
informants retrieve subjective or objective information about their organization that corresponds
to an implicit theory of firm performance, the information is likely to be biased consistent with
this theory in the direction of the (perceived) performance of the firm (Eden and Leviatan 1975;
Downey, Chacko and McElroy 1979; Martell and Guzzo 1991; Martell, Guzzo and Willis 1995;
Gerhart 1999).
This chain of events is especially likely to affect subjects providing information on measures
for which it is extremely difficult to gather information such as HR practices. Typically, SHRM
researchers are interested in the degree of enactment of actual HR practices as opposed to the
existence of stated policies (Huselid and Becker 2000). In small organizations (100 to 200
employees), asking the senior HR person about the percentage of managerial, professional, and
non-supervisory employees actively managed with customized sets of HR practices will be
information that is readily accessible as this person is likely directly responsible for the
firm-wide administration of these policies. However, as organizations grow larger (in terms of
number of employees) and more complex (in terms of more job categories, more sites, and more
business units/divisions), these practices are administered by corporate HR specialists and
division specific generalists and thus become less readily accessible to top HR officers (Gerhart
et al. 2000b; Scott 1995).
Consider the difficulty for the top HR executive for a 1000-employee firm with three
divisions and six job groups to answer the question “What proportion of the workforce is
promoted based primarily on merit (as opposed to seniority)?” with a response option asking for
proportion of exempt and non-exempt employees (Huselid and Becker 2000, p. 844). First,
the respondent would have to know what promotion practices were used for each job in
each division. Second, they would need to know the number of employees in each job in each
division. Finally, they would have to calculate two weighted averages across all job groups to
summarize this information into the proportion of exempt and non-exempt employees managed
by the practice. The calculations become exponentially more difficult as the number of divisions,
locations, and job groups increase. This process would need to be repeated for each question. It is
highly unlikely this information is embedded or easily accessible in firms’ HRIS systems
(Tansley and Watson 2000). Short of a large scale survey of HR specialists, generalists, line
managers, and employees, in all likelihood executive respondents are influenced by an implicit
theory to deduce the answers to the survey questions.
Thus, theoretically and conceptually, one can easily understand how and why an implicit
theory of HRM might impact respondents reports of HR practices. This conceptual justification
is bolstered by empirical data from other areas of management research. The following
The International Journal of Human Resource Management 59
discussion examines how implicit theories have been shown to induce response bias in other
areas of macro- and micro-organizational research.
Impact of implicit theories in macro-organizational research
There is extensive theoretical and empirical support for the proposition that implicit theories
systematically bias results in macro organizational research. Lawrence and Lorsch (1967)
concluded that firms have higher performance when managers align the properties of the
organization with the properties of the environment. Suspecting bias, several researchers
attempted to replicate the methodology used in their study and came to the conclusion that there
is a lack of convergent validity among managers’ perceptions, archival measures, and outsiders’
perceptions of firm-specific environmental uncertainty (Boyd, Dess and Rasheed 1993; Downey,
Hellriegel and Slocum 1975; Tosi, Aldag and Storey 1973). Numerous studies have suggested
that managers’ communications to outside stakeholders about the external environment are a
function of the performance of the firm. Managers in less successful organizations report their
environment as unpredictable, while managers in more successful organizations report
their environment as more stable (Bettman and Weitz 1983; Salancik and Meindl 1984; McCabe
and Dutton 1993).
One stream of strategy research attempts to document the correlates of corporate reputation
and its economic value to the firm. There is strong evidence that outsiders’ perception of
reputation is a function of firm financial performance. Every year since 1983, Fortune magazine
has published a list of the most admired corporations based on ratings of such attributes as
quality of management, quality of products/services, innovativeness, and ability to attract,
develop, and keep talented people. These ratings are provided by 8000 outside executives,
directors, and market analysts. Although the raters have access to a plethora of archival and
insider information with which to develop accurate evaluations, firm financial performance
appears to explain 39% to 59% of the variance of these measures (Brown and Perry 1994). It is
not such a great leap to believe that if external experts’ evaluations of company policies and
practices are strongly biased by firm performance, internal informants’ responses are also likely
to be biased (Gerhart 1999).
Impact of implicit theories in micro-organizational research
Numerous lab and field experiments have documented how implicit theories impact results
in micro-organizational research. Psychologists first suspected that implicit theories biased
subjects’ responses during early testing of the factor structure of personality measures.
Researchers (Norman 1963) noted that similar personality factor structures emerged whether
raters had known ratees for a long time or only a few moments. Eden and Leviatan (1975)
suspected that implicit theories may also affect organizational research subjects. To verify their
hypothesis, the authors instructed a large group of undergraduates to complete the leadership
scales of a version of the Survey of Organizations for a fictitious organization for which they
were given no information. Factor analysis resulted in the same four factor solution found in
studies using the scale with subjects of actual organizations. The authors concluded the similar
factor structures reflected a homogeneous implicit theory of leadership.
A stream of lab research followed Eden and Leviatan’s (1975) study attempting to document
the effect of implicit theories on subjects’ pattern of responses to surveys in leadership and group
process research. Specifically, scholars hypothesized that subjects with information about the
performance of a group or leader would provide biased descriptive and evaluative information
consistent with a common, implicit theory of performance. Typically, leadership researchers
60 T.M. Gardner and P.M. Wright
would first present subjects with either a written description of a leader (Rush et al. 1977), an
audio or videotape of a person leading a small group (Mitchell, Larson and Green 1977), or
allow the subjects to participate in a small group with a leader (Mitchell et al. 1977). They would
then provide subjects with (bogus) information about the performance of the leader, and have
the subjects complete standard leader behavioral questionnaires. Group process researchers
typically presented subjects with a video of a group engaged in a problem solving activity (Lord,
Binning, Rush and Thomas 1978; Rush and Beauvais 1981; Martell and Guzzo 1991; Martell
et al. 1995) or allowed subjects to participate in a group activity (Staw 1975). They provided
(bogus) performance information, then the subjects completed questionnaires asking them about
group behaviors (objective questions) and processes (evaluative questions). Across all studies,
subjects given positive performance information provided more positive evaluations of leaders
and group processes and ‘recalled’ the leader or group engaging in more positive behaviors
than subjects with negative performance information. Several studies, varying the above
methodology, have demonstrated the robustness of these findings and eliminated experiment
characteristics and other artifacts as easy alternative explanations (Rush and Beauvais 1981;
Lord et al. 1978; Martell et al. 1995).
Hypotheses
The previous discussion suggests that organizational research subjects hold implicit theories
about organizational phenomena and that these implicit theories affect subjects’ responses to
questionnaires. In past research, the impact of implicit performance theories has been
demonstrated by showing that information regarding the focal phenomenon’s performance
impacts the level of ratings provided by knowledgeable subjects. Our study uses a simple
simulation exercise to examine the existence of implicit theories regarding sets of human
resource practices and examines whether these theories influence subjects’ responses to a typical
survey of HR practices.
The above literature review suggests that implicit theories impact subjects’ responses to
questionnaires measuring HR policies and practices. Given that a plethora of research has shown
that information about performance (whether individual or organizational) influences subjects’
reports of processes, we propose:
Hypothesis 1: Subjects given positive cues about firm performance will estimate greater usage
of HR practices than subjects given negative cues about firm performance.
Hypothesis 2: Subjects given positive cues about firm performance will estimate greater
effectiveness of the HR function than subjects given negative cues about firm
performance.
If implicit HR theories indeed exist and affect subjects’ responses, one would expect they
would systematically vary according to experience. As mentioned above, implicit theories are
developed and reinforced through the observation of cause and effect relationships, quasiexperiments in which people are able to manipulate possible causal factors, and from explicit
and implicit teachings of the causal nature of the world (Kelly 1973). Such experiences could
moderate the impact of implicit theories regarding the relationship between HR and firm
performance in two ways. First, managers with first-hand experience managing people and
using/implementing HR services might have different implicit theories than naı¨ve subjects
(i.e. those who have little or no experience in working for real organizations in higher level
decision making positions). One might expect that naı¨ve subjects, lacking experience to test
implicit theories against real world outcomes might overestimate the relationship between HR
practices and firm performance. This leads to:
The International Journal of Human Resource Management 61
Hypothesis 3: Cues about firm performance will have a stronger impact on subjects with little
work experience relative to subject with significant work experience. Subjects
with little work experience will report greater differences between high
performing and low performing firms on both the estimated extent of usage of
human resource practices and evaluation of the human resource function relative
to subjects with significant work experience.
Finally, the functional background of the respondents might also moderate the impact of
implicit theories on the relationship between HR and firm performance. Subjects coming from
an HR background are likely to have both a self-serving bias and stronger identification with the
dominant mental models associated with ‘professionalized’ occupations such as human resource
management thus believing that HR practices and the HR function are integrally related to firm
performance (Melone 1994; Walsh 1995). However, respondents who are not immersed in the
HR ideology may believe that HR has less or even no impact on firm performance. Thus we
expect that persons with training and/or experience in the field of human resource management
will have stronger implicit theories regarding the covariation of HR practices and firm
performance.
Hypothesis 4: Cues about firm performance will have a stronger impact on subjects with a
background in HRM relative to subjects without such an occupational or
educational background. Subjects with a background in HRM will report greater
differences between high performing and low performing firms on both the
estimated extent of usage of human resource practices and evaluation of
the human resource function relative to subjects without such a background.
Methods
Subjects
Data were gathered from four sub-samples of individuals. First, 55 senior HR executives were
contacted by fax through a human resource research institute housed in a large university in the
northeast United States to explain the purpose and procedure of the study, and asking them to
volunteer to participate. Institute sponsors are virtually all large Fortune 500 firms. Executives
representing these companies typically hold the title of Senior Vice President or Vice President
of their respective corporations, and in most cases are the persons that would receive a survey
regarding corporate HR practices. Executives from 26 (47%) firms agreed to participate in the
study themselves along with one or more of their direct reports and one or more of their (peer)
top line executives. Each HR executive was mailed an appropriate number of survey packets
for themselves and participating colleagues. Of the 26 firms whose HR executives agreed
to participate, surveys were received from that HR executive, a direct report and/or a line
executive from 19 (73.1%) of them. In total, we received 32 surveys from HR executives and
16 surveys from line executives.
Fifty-six predominately first-year MBA and graduate engineering students were asked to
complete surveys in class during the first week of a manufacturing management class resulting in
a 100% completion and return rate. A further 38 first year graduate students in HRM were asked
to complete surveys in-class during the first week of a training and development class. The same
researcher provided an identical explanation and collected the completed surveys again resulting
in a 100% return rate.
Fully completed surveys usable for analysis were collected from 26 HR executives 14 line
executives, 42 MBA/graduate engineering students, and 31 HR students. The difference
62 T.M. Gardner and P.M. Wright
between the number of surveys completed and the number available for analysis was due to
missing data.
Procedure
Subjects were contacted as noted above. HR and line executives received packets with a cover
letter explaining the general purpose of the study as well as all of the experimental materials.
The survey itself asked subjects to read a scenario of a high (low) performing company, respond
to a survey regarding the HR practices of this hypothetical company, turn the page, read a
similarly worded scenario describing a low (high) performing company and complete an
identical survey regarding HR practices. The first 11 items were highly similar to or the same as
11 of 13 items used in the Huselid (1995) study. Questions 12 through 16 assessed participants’
evaluation of the HR functions’ contributions to firm performance. These questions were drawn
from a study of line and HR managers’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the HR function
(Wright, McMahan, Snell and Gerhart 2001b). The order of the presentation of the high and low
performing company scenario was counterbalanced across subjects. The entire survey can be
found in the Appendix. Executive respondents returned the surveys in self-addressed, postage
paid envelopes, while student respondents handed their surveys in directly to the second author.
Dependent variables
Huselid (1995) identified two distinct factors utilizing 11 items of a 13-item scale and used these
factors in his original study; each factor had similar effects on firm performance. Later studies
combined all the items into one index (Becker and Huselid 1998; Guest, Michie, Conway and
Sheehan 2003). Thus, in testing Hypotheses 1 through 4, we aggregated the 11 questions asking
respondents to estimate the proportion of employees managed with the listed practices into one
scale called HR Practice Usage by calculating of the mean of the 11 items for both scenarios for
each respondent. Coefficient alpha for this scale was 0.76 for the high performing company
scenario and 0.79 for the low performing company scenario.
Items 12 through 16 asked the subjects to estimate the contribution of the HR function to
strategic and financial outcomes. We aggregated these items into a scale called HR Effectiveness
by calculating the mean of the five items. Cronbach’s alpha for this scale was 0.83 for the high
performing company scenario and 0.91 for the low performing company scenario.
Independent variables
As mentioned above, subjects came from pools of graduate HR students, MBA students,
graduate engineering students, HR executives, and line executives. Experience was
operationalized by whether the respondent w