Exploring the relationship among human resource flexibility, organizational innovation and adaptability culture

Abstract

Purpose Human resource (HR) flexibility is a firm-level capability that consists of employee skill flexibility, employee behavior flexibility, and HR practice flexibility. HR flexibility allows organizations to adapt and be responsive to changes in their environments. Findings from this paper indicate that if the organization is highly innovative and has flexible HR policies, then that influences organizational culture, risk-taking and experimentation within a firm. This paper has also revealed that process innovation mediates between adaptability culture and product innovation. It also revealed that managers should emphasize processes to improve efficiency for resource exploitation. The lessons learned from process innovation activities indicated that having a strong knowledge base assists a firm in developing innovative technology such as automation for manufacturing, handling and testing or simply smart manufacturing. Design/methodology/approach Questionnaires were sent to employees at 23 Taiwanese companies in high-tech industries, where innovation is the key to their survival, and 293 valid surveys were collected. Structural equation modeling, (SEM) using IBM SPSS Amos, was used to test the hypotheses. Findings The results fully support the hypotheses that HR flexibility positively influences adaptability culture and contributes to organizational innovation. Furthermore, it was found that adaptability culture has a direct impact on process innovation and an indirect impact on product innovation through process innovation. Originality/value The critical role of HR flexibility and adaptability culture on organizational innovation in the high-tech sector were highlighted. The importance of HR flexibility is emphasized to provide managerial hints to top managers.

Correlation among Human Resource Flexibility Strategy, Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Organizational Performance in Ecotourism Industry

“…Lúanaigh and Hughes [15] indicated that employees with proper autonomy of time would have higher satisfaction to further enhance the organizational performance. Do et al [13] stated that an enterprise need not pay extra welfare expenses for non-typical workers of temporary staff and outsourcers that it could control the costs and effectively promote the organizational performance. Way et al [16] proposed the maximal effect of human resource salary flexibility on employees' average monthly productivity that the higher salary flexibility would show better soft performance and higher average monthly production amount to effectively enhance organizational performance.…”

Human resource management in promoting innovation and organizational performance

“…Innovation and creativity are also essential so that the organization can win an increasingly stringent competition in the changing environment (Chow, 2017). An innovative organization is proven to maintain a competitive advantage (Johannessen & Skaalsvik, 2015;Ghosh, 2015) because it can respond faster to environmental changes (Do, Yeh, & Madsen, 2016). A key to the ability to create innovation to support the organization's performance is the support of the quality of human resources, which should be on the top priority (Rajiani & Norain, 2018).…”

What Do We Still Need to Know about Employee Creativity: A fsQCA Approach

“…The methods they used in doing these studies were structural equation models and multiple regression analysis. Organizational culture or atmosphere [10], leadership [9], organization-based self-esteem [24], and technical solution knowledge [25] are believed to be the factors that can promote employee creativity performance in most research. Because of the high uncertainty, external environment, and globally high competition, organizations need to have a dynamic ability to cope with fierce challenges to seek sustainable development.…”

“…Configuration 1 and configuration 2 have a stronger explanatory power than other paths, which implies that it is a critical consideration combination. Configuration 1 implies that when work values are unimportant in this particular path or employees with less distinct values, three dimensions of human resource flexibility will make joint efforts for creativity [9]. In particular, employee behavior flexibility is the core factor.…”

“…Flexibility management is an important component of strategy of organization [8]. If organizations possess flexible reaction and adaptability to the environment and formulate systematic management practices [9], they will gain competitive advantages in a dynamic and ferocious environment. Human resource flexibility exerts a crucial role in organizational performance.…”