Identifying a guiding list of high involvement practices in human resource management

In today global competitiveness, it is becoming increasingly frequent, the introduction of new management practices to organizations, seeking to enhance performance as a form of Management Innovation (MI). This is so because such practices are usually difficult to replicate exactly from one company to another, provided they are well rooted in the daily work in the organization. The main purpose of this paper is, by reviewing the previous work done in this area, to present a general list of Human Resource Practices (HRM practices) geared towards improving organizational effectiveness and hence better performance outcomes. Many work have been done to date within this topic, but it is difficult to find a consensus about the best way to address to this practices, and this fact makes difficult to compare different studies and their results. We present a detailed but synthesized list of those HR practices to be used as a starting point in any sector whether industrial or services.


Introduction: Purpose of the paper and related work
In a world where global competitiveness is one of the main keys to organizations' success; where innovation, flexibility, responsibility and cooperation become particularly relevant to ensure organizational success, or even mere survival (Adamides y Pomonis, 2009;Antonelli, 2009;Burnes, 2004;Paauwe y Boselie, 2005;Zhang et al., 2008), the importance of human capital, as a source of competitive advantage, is gathering especial significance for both, researchers and practitioners alike.
It is becoming increasingly frequent, the introduction of new management practices to the organization, seeking to enhance performance, as a form of Management Innovation (MI) (Paauwe y Boselie, 2005;Perello-Marin et al., 2013).This is so because such practices are usually difficult to replicate exactly from one company to another, provided they are well rooted in the organization's daily work, or in other words, they are part of their own identity (Mol y Birkinshaw, 2009;Thang et al., 2007).If we look at other resources as a source of competitive advantage, different from HR, we can state that they are becoming more accessible and easy to copy, and therefore, ephemeral sources of competitive advantage, which does not happen with complex social systems (Bowen y Ostroff, 2004;Stavrou et al., 2010).
Selection and implementation of those programs and practices have been extensively studied by the body of research called "strategic human resource management" (SHRM) (Benson et al., 2006;Boselie et al., 2005;Combs et al., 2006;Lawler III et al., 1995;Stavrou et al., 2010;Way, 2002).Within these papers, myriad of programs and practices in HRM can be found to be implemented by the firms to increase its performance.The foregoing papers approach the study either from the perspective of individual practices or on the contrary, as a whole system of practices (though often, with no clear identification of its composition).
We have found that an increasing body of work contains the argument that the use of certain practices (including comprehensive employee recruitment and selection procedures, incentive compensation and performance management systems, and extensive employee involvement and training) can improve the knowledge, skills, and abilities of a firm's current and potential employees, increase their motivation, reduce shirking, and enhance retention of quality employees while encouraging nonperformers to leave the firm (Huselid, 1995;Roos et al., 2004;Way, 2002).These practices can be referred differently in the academic literature as for instance, "high-performance work practices" (Guest et al., 2004;Way, 2002;Wood et al., 2012), "high-involvement work practices" (Benson et al., 2006;Guerrero y Barraud-Didier, 2004;Lawler III et al., 1995;Zatzick y Iverson, 2006), "high commitment practices" (McClean y Collins, 2011) or "innovative human resource practices or best practices" (Chang et al., 2011;Ichniowski y Shaw, 1999;Marchington y Grugulis, 2000;Paauwe y Boselie, 2005), depending on the author.Each term has little nuances that distinguish each other, but most of the authors agree with the fact that when business capabilities are combined with employees motivation, the resulting organization value is not a sum of its parts, but a multiplication (Combs et al., 2006;Guest et al., 2004;Ordiz Fuertes, 2002) or in other words the method used by firms to manage its workforce can have a positive impact on firm performance (Way, 2002).This paper deals with Human Resource Practices (HRM practices) geared towards improving organizational effectiveness and hence better performance outcomes; that is, not merely traditional HR practices, but a set of distinct but interrelated HRM practices that together select, develop, retain, and motivate employees that, not only possess superior abilities, but also apply their abilities in their workrelated activities; And as a consequence, their work-related activities (i.e.their output) result in these Identifying a guiding list of high involvemnt practices in human resource management Perello-Marin, M.R.; Ribes Giner, G.
firms achieving superior intermediate indicators of firm performance and sustainable competitive advantage (Way, 2002).Although there are some works done considering this issue (Boselie et al., 2005; Marin-Garcia y Conci, 2009), we have not found a clear consensus about a clear and concise definition about which particular bundles of practices can be called 'high performance practices' (ie practices that lead to greater employee involvement and commitment and better business results as a consequence) (Combs et al., 2006); and therefore we have gone through this study with a porpuse of identifying a detailed but synthesized list of those HR practices called 'High involvement HR practices', 'High commitment HR practices', 'best HR practices' or 'innovative HR practices' by main authors to be used as starting point in any research, no matter the context of the study.

Methodology
In this work, we have gone through the literature of human resource management and related to improve organizational performance by enhancing employee commitment and motivation, looking for the most commonly used HR practices.We have focused only on high involvement practices, high commitment practices, or innovative HR practices, that lead to better performance, but not on traditional Human Resources practices.We do not address either in this work what it does mean by performance.
In doing so, we have employed several methods to guarantee content validity.We have started by a literature review and afterwards we have validated the results with expert panels combined with two steps Qsorting (Petter et al., 2007).
To identify all available studies, identifying and/or using this kind of HR practices, we dealt with this literature review by using a variety of search techniques.We specially conducted electronic keyword searches as well as manual searches of relevant journals to identify studies that appeared relevant.
To render the task manageable, and to provide a credible guarantee of quality, we restricted our search to articles that have been submitted to international journals specializing in general management, organization science, human resource management and international human resource management that regularly publish studies on human resource management and organizational performance (e.g.This decision meant that we had to exclude valuable work published in books, reports, unpublished papers and dissertations.We went through each edition of the journals online, identified articles from their titles and abstract that seemed to match our criteria.
Finally, we examined the reference lists of the collected articles and we supplemented it with other academic and trade articles from outside these journals that appear to contain some identification of HR practices leading a better performance.Those later articles were identified through both the Business Source Premier, Web of knowledge and Science Direct article databases, for the period of time comprised between year 2000 up to mid-2012, by searching using certain keywords.
In order to select the most adequated key words to be used within the study, we worked in a small group of researchers using interactive brainwriting technique.We chose brainwriting eventhough it is less well known than traditional group brainstorming, since we found evidences that brainwriting often not only produces more ideas than group brainstorming, but also reduces the inconvenients.Writing ideas instead of speaking them in groups eliminates the problem of production blocking since individuals do not have to wait their turn to generate ideas.It may also reduce evaluation apprehension since the written format eliminates the need for public speaking and is typically more anonymous than oral brainstorming, and finally brainwriting requires less specific training, especially interms of the moderator, than brainstorming (Paulus y Yang, 2000).
As a result of the brainwriting process, the list of keywords obtained was 'Human Resources Management practices', 'High Involvement work practices', 'innovative Human Resources practices', 'human resource bundles' and 'organizational performance', or 'business performance'.It is important to note that, although we began our review in 2000; however, we have included references prior to this date, but with the only condition of being especially relevant in this topic, as for instance (Arthur, 1994;Delery y Doty, 1996;Huselid, 1995;MacDuffie, 1995).All the articles were examined for HR practices leading to better performance content.The criteria used to select any article was the it may be focus on any aspect of this HR practices as we have defined in advance (but not traditional HR practices).In total, after all the different searches, our overview draws on a comprehensive sample of 265 articles.Finally, we read carefully the articles, in order to meet to settle on a final sample of 62articles.
Once all analyses had been completed satisfactorily, we listed all the practices we identify in the different papers, and we aggregated them.We aggregated only those that, even having different formulation, are equivalents in meaning.i Furthermore, on the basis of the literature review described above, a set of HR experts composed of three academics, and four HR professionals, considered that the relevant areas in which human resource practices could be grouped were eight.For this classification, we have employed an adaptation of Guest's classification (Guest et al., 2003) and Way's categories of practices (Way, 2002): 1) Staffing; 2) training and development; 3) Appraisal and feedback; 4) Compensation; 5) Job design and Job Analysis; 6) Internal communication and knowledge management (Information sharing); 7) Employment security and commitment; 8) Quality, Active participation and Teamwork.
At this point, the next step was, by using Q-sorting (Petter et al., 2007), drawing the final compendium of HR practices.We took the complete list of practices identified at the first step, and we classified them into those further eight categories.The process was as follows, once each member of the team has made his/her first classification, we read all the items within each category looking for aggregate any of them (there were, still, many practices referring to same concepts, but using different formulations).As a final step, all the experts shared their final classification in order to compare results and find a common final consensus classification and summary.So that, we obtained the final compendium of all the HR practices, grouped by categories.It becomes more manageable and easy to use in further researches, given the wide variety of conceptual topics covered.
It should be noted that in the first list of practices we made, there were some practices that, while called in this way by authors, they were referred to policies or programs instead.This is due to the lack of consensus in using the terms.In this work, we adopt (Arthur y Boyles, 2007) definition, who distinguish between principles, policies, programs, practices and climate, as different elements of any HR system.Although in the initial table we have enclose all of them, for the final result we have refine it by selecting only real practices and programs.
Identifying a guiding list of high involvemnt practices in human resource management Perello-Marin, M.R.; Ribes Giner, G.

Findings
We have summarized the most common HR practices used by scholars to be applied to any sector, location or firm size classifying them into the 8 groups described above.We show here such a general list, not because we follow a universalistic approach, but in order to draw a first-point picture to be used, and completed to any context.The final classification of the most commonly used HR practices to enhance organizational performance is shown in table 1.

Training and development (includes Talent Management) PR7
Integration plan for new employees: structured training plan which aims to transmit history, culture and values of the company.
PR40 Employees participate in work improvement teams (Tari et al., 2007) (Guest et al., 2003) (Waal, 2007) PR41 Employees have the responsibility of ensuring the quality of their own work.Individuals are allowed to make decisions in workplace.

Research limitations and future research
This work presents a detailed but synthesized list of those HR practices called 'High involvement HR practices', 'High commitment HR practices', 'best HR practices' or 'innovative HR practices' by main authors.Although we agree there are differences between contexts (Ahmad y Schroeder, 2003;Bayo-Moriones et al., 2008;Cho et al., 2006;dos Santos Moreira, 2008) (sectors, dimensions, locations etc...) in implanting HR practices (contingency framework) (Dewettinck y Remue, 2011) , we have found interesting to define a general simple list of practices to be used as starting point in any research, no matter the context of the study.Thus, this initial list might be extended, or particularized for any context, but, studies carried out starting from the initial general list of practices, could be comparable, which at the moment, we have found difficult despite the vast existing literature.