RESEARCH NOTES AND COMMUNICATIONS HUMAN RESOURCE PLANNING AND ORGANIZATION PERFORMANCE: AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS

STELLA M, NKOMO
College of Business Administration, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Human resource planning (HRP) has received considerable attention as a method of linking strategic organization objectives to human resource programs and policies. The underlying assumption is that human resource planning applications can have a major positive impact in the areas of personnel cost-effectiveness, employee productivity, and management resource development. The purpose of the study conducted in this paper is to explore the impact of human resource planning on organization performance. The main objective of this study is to find out if there is a difference in the organization performance of firms engaging in formal human resource planning and that of firms not engaged in such planning. The intention of this exploratory study is not to prove or disprove that human resource planning leads to successful performance. Rather, the objective is to identify a group of firms utilizing human resource planning and to determine if these firms exhibit better performance than those who do not engage in human resource planning. The sample for this study consisted of those firms listed in the 1981 Fortune 500 Directory. Questionnaires were mailed to the vice-president of personnel/human resource management in each of these 500 companies. The 287 replies represented a response rate of 57%. Of the replies, 264 were usable, resulting in a usable response rate of 53%. Over 35% of the respondents were top-level personnel officerssenior vice-presidents and vice-presidents of personnel/human resources. Various characteristics such as size (e.g. total assets, number of employees, etc.) and industry group were compared to detect any possible response bias. No significant biases were discovered. It is recognized that companies doing human resource planning, and especially those who felt it had been beneficial, were more likely to respond. HRP proponents have contended that human resource planning has a positive impact on organization performance. The relative immaturity of human resource planning efforts may have prevented the effects of planning from being measured. No attempt was made to assess the quality of the human resource plans produced through the use of a formal process. It is possible that the plans developed are not fully implemented or coordinated throughout the organization. Interestingly, the firms which instituted fully integrated human resource planning processes generally experienced lower levels of performance during the pre-human resource planning period. It is possible that poor-performing firms may have instituted human resource planning as a means to improve performance. On the other hand, the non-human resource planners generally had higher levels of performance during the pre-planning period. It is possible that the management of these firms felt their organizations were successful without such elaborate programs and saw no reason to change practices. As an end note, there is little evidence in this study to suggest that human resource planning has yet begun to produce the proclaimed payoffs. Future research is needed to identify the organizational results most affected by strategic human resource planning activities and to determine in what situations formal human resource planning is most useful.
Ria Ghosh 10PGHR42