HRM-Performance Relationship: An Overview of Methodological Challenges and Prospects

Abstract

The research over the past twenty years on human resource management (HRM) and performance provides a substantial relationship; unfortunately, the results are not clear. The objective of this study is to present an overview of existing scientific literature regarding common methodological challenges and to recommend realistic solutions. This study explores the literature on the aforementioned relationship and concludes that there are major methodological challenges and repetition of such errors need to be avoided. It is concluded from the review of existing literature that the researchers have mainly focused on the measurement error that occur due to items. As for as the other two errors are concerned, the measurement due to time, and ratters, have been largely disregarded. This review further helps us to conclude that single respondent bias highly prevails in literature. Furthermore, despite considerable research in this field, researchers have greatly employed cross sectional design instead of longitudinal design. An analysis of the specification errors, on the other hand, leads to believe that research scholars did a satisfactory job in this area. Finally, researchers have mostly used small sample size at the cost of large sample size.