This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more

Economics and Management Notes Employment Relations Notes

Rbv Notes

Updated Rbv Notes

Employment Relations Notes

Employment Relations

Approximately 32 pages

For each of the 7 topics I studied, I've included my finals revision notes (except High Performance Work Systems, which I did not revise but have included the essay notes for). The notes are very concise (3-4 pages), with each subheading indicating a line of argument that could be taken in an essay on the topic (based on the exam questions that have come up over the last 6 or 7 years - the notes could be used to answer any of these well), and then bulletpointing how the argument could be laid out...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Employment Relations Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

RBV

RBV outline

  • Barney: Internal attributes must be a source of CA because some companies have gained CA despite existing in unattractive, high threat, low opportunity environments.

    • Koch and McGrath: superior performance for those firms able to create more efficient/attractive outputs due to the way they use their resources, hence firms with superior HR utilization are likely to experience superior performance.

  • Under the VRIO framework presented by Barney a firm can hope to achieve a competitive advantage by securing resources which create value, and are rare, inimitable and able to be organized to be exploited.

  • Such skills cannot be easily imitated, due to isolating mechanisms (Lippman and Rumelt) such as causal ambiguity, social complexity and path dependency.

  • Barney and Wright: apply this to human resources, implies that general skills and knowledge add value to all competitors, and assuming competitive labour markets, these will therefore lead to competitive parity. However firm specific skills, the use of teams rather than individuals, the constant development of HR practices and their integration into the system can lead to CA.

  • HR policies can deliver these mechanisms so can be extremely valuable (Boxall). For example routines – repetitive patterns of behaviour, processes such as combining and allocating resources in a firm. Build upon one another in a path dependent way (Koch and McGrath).

  • Eg teams are much harder to imitate than individuals, who can be lured away.

  • Tautological?

Implications for managers (dynamic capabilities)

  • HR planning – analyzing an org’s HR needs under changing conditions and developing the activities necessary to satisfy these needs firms using this more likely to know what specific characteristics they are looking for in applicants, so can improve quality of hiring decisions (Koch and McGrath). Should also evaluate hiring practices. Positive link with labour productivity.

  • Aim to reduce ex ante uncertainty about future potential of recruits, by searching at the extensive margin, and increasing information used to compare individuals. Found positive link with labour productivity. (Koch and McGrath).

  • Employ company sponsored training to increase firm specificity of employee skills, use training and internal promotion as benefits accumulate over time creating bundles of routines difficult to imitate.

However

  • Bowman and Swart: this assumes that the boundaries of the resources (eg physical and human capital) are easily identifiable and there is little tension/struggle of ownership between actors involved in the process of value capture.

  • Embodied capital – cannot exist in a form separated from individuals or teams, includes the tacit knowledge often cited as being resources under RBV. Interact with other forms of capital to create value.

  • Capture of value is a function of the bargaining process between the actors...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Employment Relations Notes.