Using human resource management to enhance competitiveness: Lessons from four excellent companies

Recent research has emphasized the strategic focus that human resource management must have in order for an organization to fully utilize its human resources in a competitive market. However, few empirical studies have been done to date regarding how human resource planning should be linked to strategy. An extensive in-depth study of four large, complex, and very successful companies supports the widespread belief that human resource management can be a powerful tool to enhance competitiveness when policies and practices are logically driven by a firm's strategy and by the key environmental factors it faces. This article describes that study and looks at how the areas of selection, appraisal, reward, and development are handled by these firms. Based on both the specific policies and the actual practices as perceived by middle managers (those that implement the policies), the article presents a contingency framework which offers guidelines as to how certain HRM practices should be implemented to gain competitive advantage.     

Extrapolating understanding of food risk perceptions to emerging food safety cases

Important determinants of risk perceptions associated with foods are the extent to which the potential hazards are perceived to have technological or naturally occurring origins, together with the acute vs. chronic dimension in which the potential hazard is presented (acute or chronic). This study presents a case study analysis based on an extensive literature review examining how these hazard characteristics affect people’s risk and benefit perceptions, and associated attitudes and behaviors. The cases include E. coli incidences (outbreaks linked to fresh spinach and fenugreek sprouts), contamination of fish by environmental pollutants, (organochlorine contaminants in farmed salmon), radioactive contamination of food following a nuclear accident (the Fukushima accident in Japan), and GM salmon destined for the human food chain. The analysis of the cases over the acute vs. chronic dimension suggests that longitudinal quantification of the relationship between risk perceptions and impacts is important for both acute and chronic food safety, but this has infrequently been applied to chronic hazards. Technologies applied to food production tend to potentially be associated with higher levels of risk perception, linked to perceptions that the risk is unnatural. However, for some risks (e.g. those involving biological irreversibility), moral or ethical concerns may be more important determinants of consumer responses than risk or benefit perceptions. (Lack of) trust has been highlighted in all of the cases suggesting transparent and honest risk–benefit communications following the occurrence of a food safety incident. Implications for optimizing associated risk communication strategies, additional research linking risk perception, and other quantitative measures, including comparisons in time and space, are suggested.     

Identifying Fraud in Online Auctions: A Case Study

According to the FBI (IC3, 2011), losses as a result of auto‐auction fraud exceeded $8.2 million dollars in 2011. How can one detect deception in online auction transactions? The authors use a comprehensive case to teach students about deception detection processes, detection cues, and the e‐commerce environment. Students are challenged to make a professional judgment about whether the transaction under consideration is an attempt to deceive. The case is based on a real‐life situation and provides a valuable exercise for business students, educating them in the reality of online auction markets and developing their critical thinking skills. The case may be used with undergraduate accounting majors in Accounting Information Systems classes and with graduate students in an e‐commerce course either as an in‐class assignment or as a term project. Students provided favorable responses as to the value of the case.     

Ethical Context, Organizational Commitment, and Person-Organization Fit

The purpose of this study was to assess the relationships among ethical context, organizational commitment, and person-organization fit using a sample of 304 young working adults. Results indicated that corporate ethical values signifying different cultural aspects of an ethical context were positively related to both organizational commitment and person-organization fit. Organizational commitment was also positively related to person-organization fit. The findings suggest that the development and promotion of an ethical context might enhance employees' workplace experiences, and companies should consider adopting ethical policies that support principled conduct, punish unethical actions, and increase individual perceptions of an ethical company environment.     

Employer risk-adjustment transitions with inertial consumers: Evidence from CalPERS

Risk-adjustment policies, which transfer money from insurers with healthy consumers to those with sick consumers, are an important tool to contend with adverse selection in health insurance markets. While the steady-state properties of risk-adjustment have been studied extensively, there is less evidence on the transition phase of policy implementation. We study the introduction and removal of risk-adjustment at California Public Employees' Retirement System and show that these changes meaningfully impact premiums via plan differences in enrollee health status. Despite these premium differences, there is limited consumer resorting due to consumer inertia, though new active enrollees respond more fluidly. We show that, with inertial consumers, risk-adjustment changes have substantial distributional consequences, leading to worse outcomes for sicker consumers when removed and vice-versa when implemented. We estimate a model of plan choice with premium sensitivity, brand preferences, and inertia and use these estimates to study the interaction between risk-adjustment policies and the strength of inertia.     

Talent management in English universities during the coronavirus pandemic

This article reports a longitudinal study exploring talent management, through narratives provided by a group of managers of doctoral programmes in eight UK universities during the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. These managers were also academics, researchers and doctoral supervisors and their perspectives were gathered before and during “lockdown,” and then into the subsequent confused period of semi-lockdown / second lockdown, as cases of Coronavirus increased again in late 2020. Changing socio-economic circumstances, together with the added pressures of family responsibilities, impacted on participants' perceptions of changing roles and relationships during the pandemic. Over 12 months, six semi-structured online interviews (each lasting between 50 and 120 minutes) were conducted, using available platforms, with intervening emails. The narratives showed both formal and informal “talent management methods” and emphasized the need to use both to attract and retain international students.