Welcome to our first lecture for LER 562, Planning and Staffing. We'll certainly have plenty of time in our concurrent sessions to talk…
The book model is pictured on this slide. As you can see it starts with the mission and goals and objectives of the organization. So really mission and vision that the organization sets out, and it moves right into organizational and HR and staffing strategy, and kind of outlines, if you look at these arrows and the way that they're pointing, back and forth to each other, there's an interaction that's going to occur between the organization strategy and HR and staffing strategy. So we'll focus on, for this chapter, in kind of as a nice umbrella or overarching way to think about our book is we'll cover staffing strategy. You certainly might be aware of the idea you know HR has to have a seat at the table, quote unquote, and what does that mean well you know it's a seat at the leadership level of the organization that adds value there.
So in order to kind of earn your place at the table, it's important you have certain skills and knowledge and abilities that you could offer to the organization at large. So certainly you need to be able to speak the language of the organization to the degree that finance undergirds that, it's important, but also you need to know what you have to offer that maybe the rest organization isn't going to be as familiar with, and those are what you find at the bottom of the model. So you're going to have some level of legal expertise when it comes to staffing law. You're going to know what it means to plan for fluctuations internally and driven by external factors in the labor market. You'll know the importance of job analysis and how to think through the rewards and compensation of employees. That's all just supported if you look then on the right side, the course staffing activities, recruitment selection and understanding how to go about the employment contractual employment relationship in making employment decisions. All are going to be things that you should have knowledge of by the end of this course and certainly many of you have been working in this area long enough to have plenty of experience of in various activities here and perhaps even at the kind of strategic level of finding ways that HR can help contribute to and better an organization strategy.
Alright, I will note that at the very bottom of the model is staffing system and retention management so we'll spend some time on it as well. Retention management is getting at retaining employees as you might imagine. This is very important. There are perhaps times where you want some level of turnover, right, but you want the turnover to occur in a predictable manner and you want maybe certain types of people on, maybe the low performers, to select themselves out of the organization, but not high performers in most cases. So talking about, you know, what does it mean to track and try and think strategically about retaining employees and then we'll look at just a staffing system as a whole as well the income, how we tie the components together, how they work, to what degree can IT help in these different rounds of HR. Okay, so this model will really inform the rest of our semester, most of these kind of boxes and even statements within the boxes, have an accompanying chapter in this book.
As HR professionals, it's important to consider the importance of staffing in organizations. The reality is that organizations are combinations of not just people but of course physical and financial capital as well. So people are one component but if you look at the scope of the costs associated with an organization's human capital, on average it's actually over 25% of the total revenue of an organization. Your book outlines some interesting quotes from business leaders, I like the one by Richard Fairbank especially, he says that most companies people spend 2% of their time recruiting, and 75 % managing their recruiting estates. Right? So the people make the place here, it's very important that you get the right types of people into an organization and this is where the interplay between the strategy that an organization has and the strategies that HR pursue is quite important. So you might think alright Walmart for example, a very simplistic example. Walmart is known to be a low cost retail outlet, right? So the individuals that Walmart might look to hire, especially at the retail level, are not necessarily going to be those who cost the most to employ. On the other hand, if you think about the Ritz Carlton line of hotels, you might imagine that they're not going to cut costs when they look to hire employees and this is the case. They're going to both seek and hire the best customer service they can find. And then they'll train rigorously as well, so they invest heavily in their employees. Again this is not the case, certainly not to this degree, when you look at Walmart. So that's really an elementary example of how an organization strategy, in the case of Walmart, to be kind of a low cost retail outlet and in the case of Ritz Carlton, to represent the pinnacle of customer service. So these unique organizational strategies will then work out into unique human resource, recruiting and staffing strategies.
Presidential Address to the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, American Psychological Association Convention, Los Angeles, August, 1985.
What exactly is staffing? For purposes of this course, staffing is defined as the process of acquiring, deploying, and retaining a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts in the organization's effectiveness. Alright so there's a lot going on here, a big definition. I want to breakout its implications. First off, you see acquire, deploy, and retain, key words in the process of staffing. So a acquiring is referring to external hiring here both initial in its staffing an organization to get it started, but it's also ongoing. deployment is the placement of new hires in actual jobs. This might not be the first thing you think of with staffing. In many cases, though the process you might imagine it is what we do see, which is an organization has a specific job they want to fill and they go out and hire someone to fill it. So the deployment of employee and kind of placing that person into a job, it's already been figured out before you can go about acquiring that employee. This isn't always the case. There's different times where someone is hired and then it's determined after this point, where they'd be placed in the organization. And if you'd spend a moment, think, where does this happen most often, well this occurs in many places but the military is an example where deployment is very important because you have many people come and go through basic training. If you think about the US army, and then what happens after that, well that's where it might be, just based on the needs of the organization, so if the infantry are really needed guess what, most everyone's going to going to infantry. However, might be that there's options and the military has different needs. And at that time they might look at: what are the interests of the unique knowledge, skills and abilities that a recruit offers and they might deploy them and place that person into a specific job based on what they can to bring to the table. Finally retaining, retention is a part of the staffing definition so this just is keeping employees right? There might be a time where some level of turnover is okay to the organization, but at a base level, organizations need to retain employees to keep things working right? Staffing is also a process or system it's not just an event. That's important note as we go through this course. Finally, quantity and quality both matter in fact they interact with each other. Higher quality can mean that you need a less quantity and vice versa. Now what about organization effectiveness. What do we mean? The short answer can mean a few different things, right? In order to be effective you would probably want to be profitable as an organization. You certainly want to survive, but keep your doors open. Growth is an outcome of many organizations that they would like to see happen. Right so what's required for this new and what are the unique outcome variables that are evaluated to determine if an organization is effective. We might look at the performance of individuals within the organization, both their task performance so how well are they performing the specific duties that they've been hired to do but also their organizational citizenship behavior. This gets at the degree to which employees go above and beyond just the basic requirements of their job to make the organization a better place to work at, right? They speak well of the organization, they help out, they're not quick to just work to rule and do the very minimum it takes to get the job done right these are all types of organizational citizenship behaviors, you might evaluate that. But you would also evaluate the effectiveness of leaders, maybe as subordinates, how they perceive the leaders. You might evaluate organizational commitment and could evaluate the integrity of employees, or counterproductive work behaviors, kind of bad things employees do. So you take these and then look at them across the organization. Give some various ways to consider an organization's effectiveness. Please introduce yourself to a few things that can go beyond just the accounting and finance measures that you might first think of when you think of organizational effectiveness. So again profitability kind of growth in revenue. things like that.
Your book lays out five different staffing models and it ends with its own model what we call the book model, or the staffing organizations model. But each of these models is worth the attention. So we have the staffing quantity model. Staffing quality model which is actually 2 different models, like a person job match, person organization match. We have a staffing system components model and then the book model. So we're just going spend a little bit a time on each of these. The way I like to think about them is that these are synoptics staffing models. So synoptic typically is a word that means summary or an overview. Think of synopsis but it can also mean it's doing the same content from slightly different angles and perspectives, different lenses if you will. So you can observe a phenomenon from various lenses and you can each come up with unique perspective. So I see each of these five staffing models as peering at the organization, looking at staffing. But each offering a unique perspective.
This first model, staffing quantities, perhaps the simplest, but it's important nonetheless. Where we simply look at our projected staffing requirements and carry it to our projected staffing availabilities. If after that comparison you find that you have more availabilities and requirements you'd be overstaffed. Less availabilities and requirements, understaffed. And of course if they're relatively equal you be fully staffed. Now there's going to be times where, you know, it might be worth being overstaffed but obviously that's going to be costly to an organization. Sometimes you might actually want to be understaffed if you think in the near future you're going to have a major decrease in demand for your services or manufacturing process sees you know, what have you. But oftentimes organizations simply have trouble getting where they want to be an end up being overstaffed or understaffed, not of any choice their own but because of poor planning and so this is where careful and informed planning can really help an organization.
Now the book lays out two different models in regard to staffing quality. Neither person job fit nor person organization fit. So first we're going to look a person job fit and then person organization fit. Now the graphic here is small intentionally, I just want to call your attention to what's in the book. So go ahead and look for the person job fit section in the book and pull up the diagram there. It will match what you see on your screen. A person job fit is really just what it sounds. It's looking to see if an individual matches that job. Now make it a bit more detailed, we would want to look at KSAO's. I don't believe the book in this chapter breaks apart that acronym for you so I've used the term already I believe it's knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics. So this is really what the individual brings to the table. So we look at KSAO's and we match those to the KSAO's necessary for performance of the job. And the way that we establish which KSAO's are necessary is something we cover in one of the support activities of the book, job analysis. So we match KSAO's of that person to those required by the job and we also look at motivation and we are say okay how's this person motivated we tie that to the rewards. So that's the compensation and benefits and perhaps other things that are not monetary. So we're going to match on a few different things here ideally. Again job analysis is important here to establish what the job requires.
Person organization fit is displayed as kind of an outgrowth or an extension around person job fit. So clearly a job is nested if it's under an organization, within an organization. And so when we think about personal organization fit, we start kind of go a level up and say alright, across the organization what are the values that this organization upholds and what are perhaps the values of the individual. We can look to match between those. Same thing with organizational culture. So perhaps culture and values are the most intuitive here when we think about personalization fit, but we also concerned with the ways that jobs change, grow over time. And so to this our book lays out three different ideas. There's new job duties and so this is talking about the job that the persons hired in for but here might be things added to this job, the job might change over time. Often job descriptions will say, other duties as assigned are included in this job so it's a very broad catchall kind of idea. There's also the idea here that multiple jobs exist so this next bullet point, multiple jobs. So you know often individuals aren't hired just to do any one specific job. They might be extended into another job. You might find this within understaffed organization especially, or your book also gave the example of organizations like Pfizer, who hire for competencies and what people need right out of the gate able to do multiple jobs and so that's a good place or person organization fit, kind of takes priority. And lastly organizations think about the future jobs. Rarely is someone hired in for a single job with no hope or intention of development. Now organizations benefit by developing their employees and helping them to take on jobs with greater responsibility or more advanced skills. So all of these things contribute to the idea that a person should fit not just with the job the specific tasks of that job, but also the organization right? Is there a good match of values? Is there a good match between the way that the organization works and the way that this person likes to work?
It's worth pointing out that in addition to the person organization and person job fit models that your book outlines. There are other types that are often researched and evaluated in organizations. So one is person vocation fit and this might sound like person job it and indeed it's similar but it's a bit different. So person job fit gets at how well you fit with that specific job. So this would be an accountant working at a KPMG office in Dallas, Texas for a specific boss. It's all specific to this job. Person vocation fit is just how well do you fit to the vocation or occupation of accountancy. So that's person vocation fit. It's broader than person job fit. There's also person supervisor fit and person group fit both of which I think are pretty self-explanatory right? Person group fit would be your workgroups specifically. All of these fits, the three on this slide, the two that we already covered, they are examples of just person environment fit broadly, something known as PE fit. And the definition here from a major meta-analysis I'm going share a bit more about what a meta-analysis is and some details of this link study here or this cited study here. But person environment fit is simply the compatibility between individual in a work environment, again there's different kind of levels, different ways you can think about the environment, that occurs when their characteristics are well matched okay. So next slide we'll go ahead and think through how different types of fit relate differently to outcomes.
Okay so as I a noted, The Kristoff Brown et. al study is a meta-analysis and for those who aren't familiar a meta-analysis is a way that researchers can quantify a relationship between two variables and at times even more complicated relationships, but typically just a relationship between two variables based on all studies that have been published, often unpublished even they try to find unpublished data sets by contacting authors on specific list serves that are relevant to their subject area, what have you. But anyway what happens in short is every possible correlation which is a quantified and standardized way to look at the relationship between two different variables. They take all the correlations they can find between a given set of variables. So for example we might look at person job fit and how that relates to job satisfaction or person job fit and how that relates to organizational commit. Okay so these are different outcomes that I already kind of introduced. So what we find is as you might imagine, different types of fit relate differently to different outcomes. Person job fit relates strongest to job satisfaction. As a correlation of .56. Organizational commitment is most strongly related to person organization fit. Now for both of these variables, organizational commitment and job satisfaction, person job fit and person organizational fit are related the strongest. When it comes to organizational commitment there's really little to no difference practically between person organization fit and person job fit. But then there's kind of a drop-off as we look at some of these other forms fit. So if you notice with person group fit and person supervisor fit, it is really a relatively weak relationship with organizational commit. So again the nice thing about meta-analyses as we get a lot of confidence in these relationships and their strength because it's not just coming from a single study, you know perhaps of just one organization or kind of within the bounds of one specific way we select participants. What it is, is what we find when we look over the course and over the scope of all studies that are available to evaluate these two variables. Okay so these are useful relationships that you might want to take with you in the working world. If you're trying to improve job satisfaction well turns out it's probably going to be worth evaluating person job fit with your employees. Okay so there's a lot of different ways you can go about that. there's a lot of consulting firms that will offer assessments of person job fit for you. If you do have a stronger statistical background, you can look into the development of these constructs in using them on your own. But really the development of tests even though we're certainly going to talk about it, I'm going to push the importance of tests actually throughout the semester but the development of tests is something that is really beyond the scope of this course but we'll certainly still speak at a high level and get you well introduced to test and measurement and its importance in selection.