The impact of high performance human resources management on perceived organizational performance: Human resources flexibility as a moderator

Human resources is one of the most critical components of strategic success in companies. Competitive success of organizations through people needs changing the way of organizing and leading people. An increasing number of firms changed their organization of work towards innovative, flexible, and high performance organizations. Scholars define high performance work practices as a set of distinct but interrelated HR practices that, taken together, select, develop, retain, and motivate a workforce.This dissertation focuses on the implications of selected high performance HR practices on perceived organizational performance in the Turkish industry. Limited research attention has been placed on the workforce attributes that moderate the relationship between high performance work systems and organizational performance. This study analyzes human resources flexibility as a moderator between high performance HR practices and perceived organizational performance.HR flexibility is defined as a multidimensional concept. This empirical research classifies human resources flexibility in three dimensions: HR skill flexibility, HR behavior flexibility, and HR relational flexibility. It will give a new perspective to flexibility, and will provide an overview of flexibility of employees in the Turkish industry.We propose a new research model in this study in order to emphasize the relationships between high performance HR management practices and organizational outcomes, and the impact of HR flexibility as a moderator on this relationship. High performance work practices are grouped in high performance HR configurations as skill development configuration, incentive configuration, and collaborative configuration.The proposed model is developed by using the AMO (ability-motivation-opportunity) model, concentrating on employees? knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) of employees, developing the moderator role according to the resource based view (RBV). The AMO theory underlines employees? skills, motivations and opportunities to participate. For the measurement of the research questions and hypothesized relationships a carefully designed questionnaire is used.The questionnaire named as ?Impact of High Performance Management on Organizational Performance? is applied to Employers of Manufacturing and Service Sector, which are members of TİSK (Turkish Confederation of Employers? Associations), including members of MESS (Turkish Employers? Association of Metal Industries).This empirical study extends the emerging empirical studies on firm level impact of high performance HR practices on organizational performance in the Turkish industry, and view HR flexibility as a moderator. The statistical results of the research, which is applied to white-collar employees in the Turkish industry, should be treated as preliminary. This study provides a foundation for including HR flexibility as a moderator.Keywords: High Performance HR Practices, HR Configurations, HR Flexibility, Organizational Performance