Evaluación de los servicios añadidos, funcionalidad de la web y facilidad uso

My thesis is enabled by a research framework that uses a SAP lens to attend to multi-level actor analysis, the segmentation of different employee groups, and the agency of these actors. As discussed in the previous section, all four of

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these areas have largely been neglected by SHRM literature. This section briefly discusses these four elements of my research framework as the basis for providing my research objectives in the subsequent section.

SAP as a lens for my thesis answers the general methodological calls for improved research methods within HRM scholarship (Björkman et al., 2014; Boxall, 2012, 2014; Renkema et al., 2016, 2017) through a finer-grained understanding of HR phenomena (Björkman et al., 2014). Boxall (2014) expresses the merit of looking “behind the veil of practices” (p. 583) to see how policies are perceived, interpreted and enacted. He notes that

methodologically this requires going beyond counting practices. It necessitates deep “probing beneath them to assess the underlying psychological and social process” (p. 6). Sensemaking (Weick, 1988) and sensegiving (Balogun, Bartunek, & Do, 2015; Balogun & Johnson, 2004) constitute a theoretical means to address this within an HR multivariate analysis (Renkema et al., 2016), as does a broader practice perspective (Björkman et al., 2014).

A SAP lens has been argued to deliver the sought intimacy of understanding called for within recent HRM agendas (see Björkman et al., 2014; Jackson et al., 2014). A SAP lens methodologically equips my work with the ability to unpack the interactions of the HRM function – both between themselves and with their organisational partners, formally and informally, in the formulation and implementation of HR practices, across multiple levels of analysis, into “smaller, more digestible, graspable realities” (Niemi, 2010, p. 11).

My thesis also has a multi-level organisational focus. Within HRM empirical studies, almost all research investigating HR systems has been done by

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looking at one level of analysis (Ostroff & Bowen, 2016; Wright & Nishii, 2013) – i.e. senior managers alone. A recent special issue edited by Shipton, Budhwar, Sparrow, and Brown (2017) has certainly advanced this neglect, yet attention to multi-level investigation in HRM is still nascent. My analysis occurs across multiple levels of the organisation, capturing formulation, implementation and employee perceptions of practices.

My thesis therefore attends to the dangers of focusing on one level of analysis while simultaneously ignoring other levels. Looking at only one or two levels of analysis within a single study – particularly senior managers alone – has the potential to allow for misleading findings (Wright & Nishii, 2013). Senior, middle and line managers all have different perceptions of HR practices, while there is also a high likelihood that praxis between different HR and non-HR actor pairings varies. HR practitioners can utilise their own agency in the daily doing of HR work, while the HRF’s business partners can also do the same. These may not align to what was intended when practices were created.

My research framework also considers intra-unit and employee group variability. In this thesis I account for the variability of strategic integration and action with HR practitioners amongst different BUs within the same firm. Extant research has largely viewed the firm as a whole with the HRF’s

interaction with BUs therefore mostly being treated as homogeneous; yet, “[o]rganisations are not nearly as homogeneous as the nature of our [HRM field’s] research would suggest” (Colakoglu, Lepak, & Hong, 2006, p. 210).

The same is true for within-firm segmentation of employees, which has been largely absent from the literature (Jackson et al., 2014). While it has been

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shown that within organisations, the contributions of different categories of employees diverge (Huselid, Beatty, & Becker, 2005; Lepak & Snell, 1999b), how these differences are accounted for in day-to-day HR practitioner

strategic and operational work has yet to be illuminated.

1.4.1 Actor agency

By including collective and individual actors within my framework, my research can investigate their agency. If organisations have multiple HR components within and across BUs, and these varied configurations of components have the potential to lead to multiple and varied outcomes, the agency of individuals as well as aggregate actions should be accounted for. This however has not yet been extensively investigated, with little attention afforded to the impacts of HR practitioner agency (Björkman et al., 2014; Hope-Hailey et al., 2005; Wright & McMahan, 2011).

Since the 1970’s the strategy process literature has articulated the position that social reality is not static. Rather, it is dynamic, constructed and recreated through collective and individual human agents (cf. Pettigrew, 1992). Within the broader strategic management literature, work on human agency has continued to grow - further fuelled by research showing the impact of non- senior managers on strategy process (Mantere, 2008). My work empirically attends to a dearth of enquiry surrounding actor agency dynamics between HR practitioners and BUs.

- 22 - 1.5 Research objectives

A core element of SAP is understanding what practitioners actually do (Golsorkhi, Rouleau, & Seidl, 2010; Jarzabkowski, 2004; Johnson, Melin, & Whittington, 2003b) – this also is the central focus of my thesis. My research pays particular attention to the interrelations between practices, praxis and practitioners as HR practitioners engage strategically across different BUs.

Practitioners of strategy are the internal (employees of an organisation) and external actors (e.g. consultants, trade unions, chambers of commerce, regulators and other interest groups) that interpret change and enact strategy through praxis (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009). This research therefore strives for a fine-grained understanding, not only of the often hard to distinguish line between strategic and non-strategic activity (Truss et al., 2002), but HR practitioner actions. Within this thesis, HR practitioner actions are viewed through their own situated context. Accordingly, this research is guided and

operationalised by the research questions illustrated in subsection 1.5.1.

1.5.1 Research questions

1: How strategic are HR practitioners in the development & implementation of practices across different business units?

2a: How does strategic integration occur between HR practitioners and business units?

2b: What factors affect strategic integration between HR practitioners and business units?

- 23 - 1.6 Research approach

My research has been undertaken from an interpretivist position that resulted in a “linear but interactive process” (Yin, 2014) of initially planning a means to address my broad research questions, then accounting for a back and forth evolution of my design and field work as issues presented themselves during the collection and analysis of data. My research was based upon the

philosophy that reality is experienced subjectively, both socially and

physically, with reality being socially constructed as opposed to objectively determined (Cavana, Delahaye, & Sekaran, 2001).

I utilised a single case study to undertake my research within the setting of a large Sri Lankan commercial bank. This case was carefully chosen from eight large organisations of which I had access. This case organisation was selected over other options not only for the value placed on human capital in the banking sector in general, but the corporate culture of this bank in particular. The organisational culture within this bank was articulated within its annual reports as highly employee-centric, with such a position being a principle foundation for its renowned customer service orientation. Additionally,

banking heavily relies not only on financial capital, but varied levels of highly skilled to skilled human capital (Balkin & Bannister, 1993). From a resource dependency perspective, a bank teller, for example, could be seen as in a crucial position as they control the relationship with the customer (Balkin & Bannister, 1993; Eisenhardt, 1988). Accordingly, this bank offered an ability to investigate possible tensions between practices directed at different employee segments.

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Furthermore, this bank had undertaken significant restructuring and strategic changes since the global financial crisis in which many human capital elements played a key role in the bank. Institutional access was obtained through my own personal network, which helped me to move more towards close-with relationships (Johnson, Balogun, & Beech, 2010). This is argued to be a highly effective means of being able to see “behind the curtain” of

organisational and actor workings (Johnson et al., 2010), while also offering a greater means to “look behind veil of [HR] practices” (Boxall, 2014, p. 6).

As a part of my research I interviewed participants from within the bank’s extensive branch network, the bank’s eight major BUs, as well as HR practitioners from the HRF. This included interviews with senior managers from each BU, middle managers and line managers, and employees from across the bank. This constituted 53 participants, with a total of 64 interviews taking place across the organisation.

I used an inductive qualitative approach towards my research. I employed stratified thematic sampling within a single embedded case context, relying primarily on interviews that were supported by observation and

documentation. The merits of using a single embedded case design allowed for my research to make use of multiple levels of analysis while largely keeping field level and organisational level contextual issues constant and stable. A single embedded case study is ideally suited to support multiple methods and multiple constituents in SHRM, potentially offering significant methodological value (Truss et al., 2002; Ulrich, 1996; Wright, McMahan, Snell, & Gerhart, 2001).

- 25 - 1.7 Research contributions

Despite the progress made towards HRM scholarship by HR role theory and SHRM streams of literature, both have remained somewhat insulated from one another (Björkman et al., 2014). The bridging of these two streams, as done in my thesis, offers a means to link performance outcomes to actor-centric realities (Björkman et al., 2014). The former has been addressed within SHRM scholarship, but seldom in HR role theory, and vice versa for the latter (Björkman et al., 2014). Accordingly, while this thesis represents a single case, it was designed with the intention to make a number of original contributions towards theory, practice and methodology using a SAP lens. This thesis seeks to make methodological, theoretical and practical contributions. Contributions to methodology are sought by using SAP, attending to multiple levels of analysis, and using micro perspectives of actors that incorporate actor-agency into analysis. Enabled by my methodology, my research seeks to theoretically contribute to the identification of different notions of being strategic between levels of organisational personnel (executive, senior, middle, and line

managers and employees) as well as to understand how different HR practices are directed at different employee segments. My contributions to practice entail reducing abstraction for managers of actual HR practices that are included within the resource based view of the firm and providing a clearer understanding of how HR managers can employ these.