Question

It seems to be very common sense to not have HR practices that are competing with one another. Why does this happen and what would be your recommendations to managers to try to avoid this scenario?

Provide examples from your work experiences in which incongruent HR practices existed. What was the impact on performance, motivation, and turnover?

Answer 1

It happens that organisation have incongruent HR practices, those practices that are competing with each other. It happens because the organisations have human resources as a cost, cost competitiveness means having focus on cost but since human resources add value to the organisational tasks, there is regular investments in the human resources with training, incentives and learning opportunities. Another policy that competes with the policy of high performance human resources is employee retention that aims for hiring and employing the employees for long term when the human resources also aims at high productivity and in the process does not give any relief to employees in their goals and work even if it leads to employees leaving the organisation due to job stress.

Such competing HR practices occur because the companies need to follow profit maximisation as one of the important goals of the organisation but it cannot achieve it without its human resources. Hence, it tries to develop policies that are favorable to organisational performance but also developing its human resources that also help in better productivity and performance.

HR Managers need to maintain balance to overcome such situations with clarity of goals and processes so that there are clear guidelines and benchmark to follow. Any kind of bias or organisational policy is not violated. It is fair to employees if they are clear on organisational practices and rules are followed in conflicting situations.

In my work experience, examples of incongruence that I have seen is rising costs of employees due to their increasing compensation as a result of special skills and companies struggling with the goal of cost competitiveness and skilled manpower. In such situation, either the company or the employees compromise based on the other options available to them and their interests.