Understanding High-Level Performance Working Systems
You are a human resource consultant. You currently are a partner at McBain & Company, one of the world’s largest consulting firms. The company has recently been hired by HealthReach, one of Australia’s largest providers of private healthcare. HealthReach operates over 20 private hospitals across Australia and New Zealand.
You met with the CEO of HealthReach, Dr Livingstone, over lunch to discuss the problems facing HealthReach. Dr Livingstone explains that over the last two years, absenteeism and turnover rates amongst the nursing staff across all hospitals have increased sharply. She has also been informed by the COOs of some hospitals that the quality of patient care is also declining, and job satisfaction and morale amongst the nursing staff is plummeting. You ask Dr Livingstone a series of questions about the composition of the nursing workforce within the company, and to document any changes to the HR policies and practices which may have resulted in this decline. Dr Livingstone explains that the company had made a conscious decision to employ more causal nurses over the last two years, primarily to cut costs. Now, 48% of nurses are hired on a casual basis, compared to only 20% three years ago. Dr Livingstone then goes on to describe some of the company’s HR practices over the last few years ….
‘Our work system at the moment is very hierarchical – nurses work on their own, receive the bare minimum of training and we don’t have any performance incentives – you get paid at your level, no matter whether you are a poor performer or an excellent performer. Our nurses have very little autonomy – there are tight controls over what they do, and how they do it. But, this is the way that we have always done our work – it has been the same for the last thirty years. It just doesn’t seem to work anymore. But, what about if we developed a suite of practices in our hospitals so that we can develop our own high performance work system? You know, a program of extensive training for nurses; where they work in teams and we financially reward nursing staff for exemplary performance. We empower them to make their own decisions and worked on ensuring each nurse is clear about their role, and have some control over their own work’.
Dr Livingstone continues … ‘I need some help to convince the Board that this kind of approach will work. I’ve come to you because you know the research on this, and you’ll be able to put together a proposal that will show that these kinds of HR practices will improve nurse’s attitudes towards their job, will reduce burnout and will ultimately improve performance’.
Assessment task 1: HR Consultancy Plan (20%)
The purpose of this assignment is to create a plan for your consultancy report for Dr Livingstone. In your plan, please: Identify four recent, relevant, related articles from the HPWS literature, which addresses the problems outlined by Dr Livingstone. At least one article should explore the components of a high-performance work system in the health context, and at least one article should explore the impact of the casualization on these practices. Read and analyse the articles. Write a brief summary of the article, of no more than 150 words, which addresses the following:
Identify the issue addressed in each article.
Briefly summarize the key findings presented in each article.
Explain how this research will support the use of HPWS at HealthReach.
This Assignment will help you to build your writing and critical thinking skills, and should reflect the principles of scholarly work. This requires a critical analysis of relevant concepts and the presentation of an argument. The presentation of a list of facts, which are not analysed or evaluated, will not normally attain a pass grade.
All reference material must be appropriately cited in the text of your essay. Include a separate reference section that includes the full citation information. Follow the style guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA) for referencing. Note that Wikipedia and similar websites are NOT acceptable sources of academic information for the assignment.
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When deploying High-Performance Work Systems (HPWS), significant thought has been paid to capturing inter-organization heterogeneity. Investigating variables that contribute to HPWS implementation can have major theoretical and practical implications when HPWS is positively connected to performance results (Pak & Kim, 2018). This research contributes to the current HPWS literature in two ways. First, it attempts to create the HPWS team's intensity and identify background information of team variance. It is believed that the visible engagement of team managers in the HPWS implementation process is a key interpretive filter that reveals differences in HPWS intensities among team members, which affect team performance (Pak & Kim, 2018). Second, since HR rules are regarded as an agreement between the firm and its employees, a team manager who is more actively implementing spouse HR practices may have a good impact on how Human Resource Management (HRM) influences team members' psychological contract performance (OCB).
A prior research on the High-Level Performance Working Systems (HPWS) often acknowledges HPWS as a job requirement and argues that it creates a variety of health issues for employees. However, the therapies that alleviate this negative impact have received little attention. In this study, we look at whether and how a staff's personnel and employment resources may help to avoid a healthcare shortage caused by service-driven HPWS (Bacon & Blyton, 2015). We propose to buffer the SHPWS process of health deterioration due to strain using the work requirements-resources model (Bacon & Blyton, 2015).
Against a backdrop of the increasing precipitation of the workforce, it shows the effect of the intersecting between psychological working circumstances and health on the health and well-being of the...