آشنایی با سیستم های کاری با عملکرد بالا: سهم مشترک اقتصاد و منابع انسانی مدیریت

High-performance work systems (HPWS) are organizations that utilize a fundamentally different approach to managing than the traditional hierarchical approach associated with mass production/scientific management. At the heart of this emerging approach is a radically different employer-employee relationship. Leading organizational behavior specialists believe that HPWS has the greatest potential to provide sustained competitive advantage to companies adopting it. Thus, human resource managers and scholars as well as economists ought to be very interested in it. While much has been written about HPWS in the human resource management (HRM) literature, economists’ attention to it has been practically nil despite the fact that organizational economics is a significant area within economics. The primary purpose of this paper is to improve our understanding of the superior economic performance of HPWS. The secondary purpose is to compare the respective contributions of the HRM and economics disciplines to this understanding. The HRM/organizational behavior literature contains important explanations regarding the economic performance of HPWS. In contrast, there is hardly any economic literature explicitly focused on HPWS. However, as indicated below, economic theory, particularly x-efficiency theory, can be adapted to this purpose. The explanations that make the most sense of the economic performance of HPWS are interdisciplinary ones that integrate economics with organizational behavior.

The plan of the paper is as follows. Section two describes the characteristic features of HPWS and cites evidence regarding its economic performance. Section three examines HPWS from the standpoints of mainstream organizational economics and mainstream HRM. Section four brings to bear behavioral economic and organizational behavior perspectives with respect to understanding the performance of HPWS and attempts to integrate these. In addition, this section focuses on the essential reasons for HPWS’ superiority and why, despite this, HPWS’ diffusion has been slow. The final section provides conclusions.