Description
The HRM function in organizations has gained increasing strategic emphasis, and the importance of its alignment HRM and business strategies is well-acknowledged. In fact, effective HRM is vital in order to be able to meet the market demands with well-qualified employees at all times.
Information Technology
in Human Resource
Management: An
Empirical Assessment
By Alok Mishra, PhD, and Ibrahim Akman, PhD
The present paper begins by introducing a number of observations on the
applications of information technology (IT) in the field of human resource
management (HRM) in general. This is due to the fact that IT and its wide range of
applications have already made their presence felt in this area. This will be
followed by a report on the findings of a survey on the present trends in
organizations with in the different sectors in Turkey. Although the impact of IT on
HRM has long been attracting the interest of academics, no empirical research has
ever been realized in this field in Turkey, and few studies have been reported
elsewhere. The survey was conducted among the 106 IT managers and
professionals from various sectors, based on whose results, the data shows that IT
is used extensively in the organizations to perform HRM functions in Turkey’s
dynamic economy. The results also indicated that, while IT has an impact on all
sectors in terms of HRM to certain extent, the types of IT used vary significantly
between recruitment, maintenance, and development tasks. However, the empirical
results here reveal that these organizations are not applying these technologies
systematically and maturely in the performance of HRM functions.
Keywords: Human Resource Management (HRM), Human Resource Management
System (HRMS), Human Resource (HR), Information Technology (IT), ANOVA test,
Chi-square test.
T
he HRM function in organizations has gained increasing strategic emphasis, and
the importance of its alignment HRM and business strategies is well-acknowl-
edged.
1
In fact, effective HRM is vital in order to be able to meet the market
demands with well-quali?ed employees at all times.
2
Technology and HRM have a broad range of in?uences upon each other, and HR
professionals should be able to adopt technologies that allow the reengineering of the
HR function, be prepared to support organizational and work-design changes caused
by technology, and be able to support a proper managerial climate for innovative and
knowledge-based organizations.
3
These technological advances are being driven
primarily by strong demands from human resource professionals for enhancement in
speed, effectiveness, and cost containment.
4
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 243
Snell, Stueber, and Lepak
5
observe that HRMSs can meet the challenge of
simultaneously becoming more strategic, ?exible, cost-ef?cient, and customer-oriented
by leveraging information technology. Many experts forecast that the PC will become
the central tool for all HR professionals.
6
Virtual HR is emerging due to the growing
sophistication of IT and increased external structural options.
7
IT is beginning to
enable organizations to deliver state-of-the-art HR services, and reduced costs have
enabled companies, regardless of the ?rm size-to purchase HR technologies.
8
One of the impacts of IT is that it enables the creation of an IT- based workplace,
9
which leads to what should be a manager’s top priority-namely, strategic competence
management.
10
Advances in IT hold the promise of meeting many of the challenges of
HRM, such as attracting, retaining, and motivating employees, meeting the demands
for a more strategic HR function, and managing the “human element” of technological
change in the future.
11
HRM could support the efforts of technological innovation’s to
achieve high performance while such innovation; itself could serve as an approach to
enable the HR function to focus more on value-added activities in order to realize the
full potential of technology and organizational strategy.
12
The biggest bene?t of using
IT in HRM to organizations is the freeing of HR staff from intermediary roles, thus
enabling them to concentrate on strategic planning in human resource organization
and development.
13
Caudron
14
has also observed that IT can automate other routine
tasks such as payroll processing, bene?ts administration, and transactional activities, so
that HR professionals are free to focus on more strategic matters such as boosting
productivity.
In the present context of increasing globalization, employing organizations and
their environments have become increasingly complex. Managers in these
organizations face growing dif?culties in coping with workforces that may be spread
across a variety of countries, cultures and political systems. Given such trends, IT has
considerable potential as a tool that managers can utilize, both generally and in human
resourcing functions in particular to increase the capabilities of the organization.
15
Substantial bene?ts of communication and information technologies can
seamlessly migrate to HR applications.
16
Those managing the human resource
functions have not ignored such advice and, as a result a widespread use of human
resource information systems (HRIS) has taking place.
17
An HRIS is a systematic
procedure for collecting, storing, maintaining, retrieving and validating the data
needed by an organization for its human resources, personnel activities and
organization unit characteristics.
18
HRISs can also provide the management with a
decision-making tool rather than merely a robust database.
19
Turek
20
offers numerous
examples of how HR technology has reduced the response time and enhanced the
quality of HR service in the workplace.
A research paper by a Cincinnati, Ohio-based HRIS consulting ?rm, Insight
Consulting Partners (ICP),
21
notes that enterprise applications tend to push
organizations toward more centralized and integrated HR and IT infrastructures. Thus,
HRIS can support long-term planning with information for labor force planning as well
as supply and demand forecasts, staf?ng with information on equal employment,
separations and applicant quali?cations, and development with information on training
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 244
program costs and trainee work performance. It can also support compensation
programs, salary forecasts, pay budgets, labor/employee relations with information on
contract negotiations, and employee assistance needs.
22
Doran,
23
a consultant with more than 25 years of experience, insists that behind
every successful HRIS implementation there is a thorough need analysis. Further,
literature suggests that success in the implementation phase relies on the ability of
managers to manage change.
24
Another organizational challenge is the creation of performance metrics to assess
the value-added contribution of new HRIS initiatives.
25
An extensive body of literature exists on the usage, adoption, and implementation
of IT.
26
However, most of the existing studies have focused on the use of IT in general.
27
Regrettably, empirical studies and the theory on how IT in?uences organizations is still
underdeveloped.
28
One area receiving little attention in the research on successful IT
use is HRM practice.
29
In particular, there are three new areas of development which
need more empirical research and application: the information technology innovation
and e-HR developmental approaches, the globally distributed engineering and
international technology entrepreneurship, professional service, and customer
relations management modeling.
30
This is further supported by Shrivastava and Shaw’s
31
observations that, despite
evidence of increasing use of HR related technology by individual ?rms, there has been
little theory development in this area. Similar observations demonstrate that the
existing literature has paid little attention to assessing the impact of IT on HRM in
various organizations in different sectors in a systematic way. Studies conducted by
Elliott & Tevavichulada
32
and Currie
33
represent some progress in this direction. They
have indicated that the sector in which the organization operates is signi?cant in terms
of in?uencing the structure of IT activities.
Some authors have also attempted to identify differences of the role of IT
between services and process oriented industries, and found signi?cant differences.
34
Most of the existing studies were conducted in western Europe and in the United
States, and their result may not be applicable to the other parts of the world due to
social and economical differences.
35
Comparatively, very little has been researched in
this ?eld in the developing countries.
Turkey is a relatively highly populated republic, and is the world’s 17th most
industrialized nation. Turkey has undergone a series of major changes throughout the
last decade, such as entrance into Customs Union with the European Union (EU) in
1996 and the inclusion on the list of candidate countries for membership in 1999.
36
These changes have had a certain impact on organizations’ HRM strategies and, as such,
these organizations have started to invest signi?cant resources in automating their HR
departments. Most of the research in this ?eld in the country is based on rather general
HRM issues, including as the need for international approach in HRM,
37
globalization
and HRM,
38
computer-aided human resource evaluation in organizations,
39
scheduling
jobs through multiple parallel channels by an expert system,
40
success factors in
women’s career advancement,
41
national pro?les and regional differences,
42
impact of
culture,
43
individual tendencies
44
and leadership values.
45
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 245
Most relevant to this study appears to be the articles by Ardic and Bas
46
and Iraz
and Yildirim.
47
Ardic and Bas
48
investigating public and private universities concluded
that such universities differ signi?cantly in terms of job satisfaction. Although their
study, in a way, provides a comparative analysis between public and private sector
organizations, it is limited to academic institutions and is not concerned with the
impact of IT on job satisfaction as for their part. Iraz and Yildirim
49
studied the impact
of IT applications on HRM. However, they have only considered the banking sector in
Turkey and their study is limited to the investigation of the role of e-learning. Another
salient point is that research sponsored by organizations in different sectors has only
been devoted to ?nding quick solutions to their own HRM problems.
50
Thus, none of
the existing literature in Turkey, to the best of our knowledge, has studied the impact of
IT on HRM activities from a more general perspective.
Due to these conditions this study investigates in what ways organizations from
different sectors are using IT technologies to perform various HRM functions in an
effective way in Turkey. Here, organizations were selected from government, public and
private sectors to ascertain IT’s impact and its implementation to perform HRM
functions in a systematic way. For the purpose of this study the term “government”
refers to national government departments. We used “public” as the third category
since it represents institutions which are concerned with decentralized services such as
universities, local government, healthcare and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) aimed at providing nonpro?t public services and hence do not easily fall into
private or government sector category. Such a categorization is relevant insofar as the
differences exist in the mission statements of these sectors.
51
Furthermore, this study
attempts to identify those IT tools and technologies which are popular, alongside their
rate of implementation in HRM in organizations.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows: The following section
introduces the evolution of HRM systems from an early stage to the present through a
review of associated literature. This is followed by research methodology. The results of
the study are then presented and discussed. Finally, the paper ends with the conclusion
and future research directions.
Trends in the Utilization of IT in Human Resource
Management
Given the scope of human resource management functions, an effective HRMS must
address a range of administrative, statutory, functional and technological requirements
in order to enable the HRMS to support the partnership between HR professionals,
program managers, ?nance staff, executives and employees; while also providing
accurate, reliable information for organization-wide planning and decision-making.
52
Companies are also advised to establish long-term relationships with technology
vendors.
53
Surveys have shown that more than 90 percent of HR departments operate with
some form of computerized HRMS.
54
In a survey undertaken by the Institute of
Manpower Studies, a number of key changes were found to have an impact on the use
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 246
of HRMSs.
55
These changes included the development of the HR function itself, which
resulted in the closure of many centralized IT functions, and today, the majority of HR
applications are networked.
In the mid-1990s, due to business process reengineering and integration of
information from diverse applications, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) became
popular among organizations. Watson Wyatt Worldwide
56
(now Towers Watson)
discovered in a survey of 649 ?rms that nearly every organization had made signi?cant
investments in some combination of enterprise resource panning (ERP), HR service
centers, interactive voice response (IVR), voice recognition systems (VRS), Web
applications and employee portals. The value of ERP is its ability to integrate other
functions with HR under a single vendor and common technology standards. In the
leading ERP systems some of the HRMS components permit the use of the internet to
reduce transaction costs.
57
For example, the HRM capability of the PeopleSoft package
(one type of ERP software) was used to track the movements of 5,000 employees across
70 locations and calculate their salaries accurately. Consequently, when operational
bene?t in payroll processing was considered, cycle time was reduced from four days to
four hours. Thus, accurate, time-effective information delivered to managers improved
the speed and quality of decision making and assisted cost control.
58
Moreover, in
keeping with changing demand patterns, most ERP vendors have introduced second-
generation Web-based HRISs that are easier to integrate with other applications.
59
Also, by integrating ?nancial and HRMS applications, the value of the HR function
itself has increased for the organization as a whole and now, in the best administrative
systems, HRMS is a subset of ERP software solutions. One of the key values of
enterprise applications is that they force companies to adopt a cross-functional view of
the organization and lead to the integration of information and processes.
60
Ashbaugh
& Miranda
61
outline a number of advantages or justi?cations regarding the selection of
enterprise HRMS solutions.
Observations of some current trends and attitudes held by industry related
organizations provide a ?tting conclusion to this section. In the 2001 Human Resources
Self-Service/Portal Survey prepared by Cedar, a software consulting and services
company,
62
it was reported that HRMSs are used for such employee productivity
applications as communications (e.g. employee manuals, corporate policies,
directories, frequently asked questions), retirement services, enrollment for health
bene?ts, bene?t enquiries and training registration. In systems expanded to include
managerial productivity applications, this survey study reports that the most widely
offered services are travel and expense management, the supply of request forms for
new employees, time card approval and reporting, budget analysis, and such
managerial reports as head count salary listings and timesheets.
63
With the “e-wave” also reaching the area of HRM, the terms e-HR or e-HRM are
being used increasingly when referring to the next development stage in IT-based
HRM.
64
A recent development in the functionality of HRM systems has been the
transition from client/server-based systems to Web-based access. This has resulted in
new options for “self-service” routines for various HR functions.
65
In terms of e-
business, the implications for the HR function are not yet fully visible, but it is certain
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 247
that e-HR will revolutionize the HR function within the next few years. The main
challenge in e-HR is the alignment of processes in the HR function according to the
future e-business challenge.
66
In most companies, the shift to e-HR from a paper-
intensive environment represents a signi?cant cultural change, particularly for
employees.
67
These e-HR systems also offer various search capabilities, such as those
for conducting organization-wide searches related to global staf?ng as well as extensive
report generation options.
68
A survey reported that more than 80 percent of respondents used or had plans to
use an HR portal tool in 2003 and organizations are using HR portals for company
communication (50 percent), employee handbooks and policies (44 percent),
work/life information and links (30 percent), bene?ts enrollment (25 percent), training
(25 percent), employee message board (22 percent), HR record keeping (22 percent)
and in areas other including recruitment and employment information (?ve percent).
69
Research Methodology
Research Model
The present study performs a systematic and exploratory analysis approach to
investigate the impact of IT applications on HRM functions. The hypotheses were
categorized according to the following empirical factors:
• Use of IT
• Type of IT tools.
The justi?cation for each empirical factor and the corresponding hypotheses are
provided below.
Use of IT
IT can bring numerous improvements to organizations.
70
Snell, Stueber and
Lepak
71
pointed out that IT has the potential to lower administrative costs,
increase productivity, lower speed response times, improve decision making and
enhance customer service, simultaneously. The effective management of human
resources also has an important role to play in the performance and success of
organizations.
72
However, despite evidence of the increasing use of HR-related
technology by individual ?rms, there has been little theory development in this
area and academia has failed to give the impact of IT on HR in organizations from
different sectors the attention it deserves.
73
Raghunathan and Raghunathan
74
reported the existence of differences in
structuring and managing IT activities between organizations from different
sectors. Currie
75
supported the view that the relationship between organization
structure and IT are sector speci?c. In other words, private and public sector
organizations adopt an organizational structure to meet the different demands
from their immediate environments and this will be re?ected in the way IT is
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 248
structured. According to Laursen,
76
it is unlikely that new innovative HRM
practices will be equally effective across different sectors. On the other hand,
Budhwar and Boyne
77
compared HRM practices in public and private sector
organizations and their results showed a number of differences in the HRM
systems in these sectors. The key areas of their analysis include recruitment and
selection, pay and bene?ts, training and development, employee relations with
emphasis on key HRM strategies. These may be taken as evidence of the fact that
the impact of IT on HRM functions may show differences between sectors.
The present study therefore proposes the following hypotheses:
H1
a
: The use of IT adopts a different pattern according to the different sector
for recruitment tasks.
H1
b
: The use of IT adopts a different pattern according to the different sector
for maintenance and development tasks.
H1
c
: The use of IT adopts a different pattern according to the different sector
for management and planning tasks.
Types of IT
A computer that runs faster with a great deal of storage space and high resolution
graphics capability is useless without software that ?ts the organizations’ needs.
78
According to Calhoun et al.,
79
IT is an important component of the organizational
decision process. The use of IT is always based on the needs of an organization
and the nature of information systems varies depending on the particular form
taken by the organization.
80
Some researchers investigated the relationship
between organization characteristics and the use of IT, and factors in?uencing the
use of IT in organizations.
Seyal et al.
81
examined the extent of use of IT in various small and medium
business organizations in Brunei Darussalam. Their study attempted to assess the
depth and breadth of IT usage in business. They concluded that the chief
executive’s computer knowledge is positively associated with the use of IT and
that businesses in different sectors have different information processing needs.
Calhoun et al.
82
also studied the impact of national culture on information
technology usage in organizations and reported the association between some
organizational characteristics and use of IT.
On the other hand, culture, control and competition as the constitution of
subjectivity, determine the locus of IT application in organizations.
83
These
studies do not consider the relationship between types of software used in
organizations and their internal operations. It is evident from previous studies
that types of IT tools in HRM functions were given due consideration.
84
Elliott and
Tevavichulada
85
bring some data that shed light on the types of software
applications taking place in HRM and their integration to HRM activities. The
results of their study reveal that most software applications used in both sectors
are not signi?cantly different except for in terms of statistics and utility programs.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 249
Their study does not provide a comparative analysis on the types of software used
for different HRM functions. They also pointed out that their sampling technique
captures only one point in time and it is expected that the number of
organizations integrating software and HRM functions will be constantly growing
with the passage of time.
Against this backdrop, it is worth to analyze the usage pattern of the types of
software for the main HRM functions and to this end, our hypotheses are
postulated as follows:
H2
a
: Type of IT tool used varies according to recruitment tasks.
H2
b
: Type of IT tool used varies according to maintenance and development
tasks.
H2
c
: Type of IT tools used varies according to management and planning tasks.
Research Instrument and the Data
A survey approach was adopted for this study and the data was obtained by means of a
questionnaire prepared in Turkish. Thorough discussions were held with HRM experts
to ?nalize the items of the questionnaire. Several HRM managers were interviewed in
this regard and their suggestions were included as much as possible. Following this, a
pilot version of the research instrument was developed and distributed to a group of IT
professionals to obtain their suggestions and clari?cations.
The questionnaire contains seven questions which involve seven variables to
meet the objectives of this research (Table 1). It is structured in nature and does not
contain any open ended questions. The respondents are required to choose one or
more of the alternatives for questions 3-6. The range of values for questions 4-6 also
shows the tasks for the corresponding HRM functions.
The respondents were the managers of IT divisions of major government, public
and private sector organizations, who were also regular attendees of the annual
workshop on the use of IT in organizations organized by the Turkish Informatics
Association. The invitations were limited to 200 organizations and the distribution of
invitations among sectors was based on “judgement sampling”. A total of 104
completed survey questionnaires were received, giving a response rate of 52 per cent.
The variables are grouped in two categories as dependent and independent
variables. The proposed dependent variables of this study are “sector” and “IT tools”
while the independent variables are “recruitment”, “maintenance and development,”
“management and planning,” “IT use” and “restructure”.
Recruitment, development and maintenance, along with management and
planning are selected as independent variables since they play important roles in
shaping employee behavior.
86
Besides, almost all of the human resource management
application software system provide features corresponding to these variables for the
success of organizations.
87
Furthermore, as there is a scarcity of this type of research
and as the selected variables have not been used by any other known study in this
context, it is also sensible to compare these basic HR functions.
88
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 250
The ANOVA test was selected to test the hypotheses. The ANOVA test provides a
nonparametric alternative to the one-way analysis of variance and is robust in its
resistance to the outliers and errors in the data relative to the usual normal theory F
test.
89
The chi-square test method is used whenever there is a need to examine the
relationship between the dependent and independent variables.
90
Results
The sectors of six respondents are not known and these are not included in the
analysis. The distribution of the remaining respondents is as follows: 44 (45 percent)
are from government, 28 (28 percent) are from public and 26 (27 percent) are from
private sector organizations.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 251
Table 1: Summary of research questions and variables
Quest. Var. De?nition Range of values
1 Sector In which sector is your Government, public, private
organization?
2 IT use Are your organization’s daily Yes/No
HRM operations heavily
reliant on computers and IT?
3 IT tools What types of IT tools are Application software (such as DBMS,
used to accomplish HR spreadsheets, data mining/data
functions? warehousing), information system software
(such as decision support systems, execu-
tive information systems, expert systems),
information and communication technolo-
gies (ICT) (such as LAN/WAN/neural
network, internet/intranet, web portals)
4 Recruitment For which of the following Position inventory, recruitment using
recruitment tasks does your Internet, employee selection, employee
organization use management and workforce planning
computers/IT?
5 Maintenance For which of the following Training and human resource development,
and maintenance and performance evaluation, employee turnover,
development development tasks does tardiness and absenteeism analysis
your organization use
computers/IT?
6 Management For which of the following Personnel ?les and skills inventory, bene?t
and planning management and planning administration, government reports,
tasks does your organization succession planning and implementation
use computers/IT?
7 Restructure Does your organization have Yes/No
any plans to improve IT use
for its HRM department
Use of IT: The test results are reported in Table 2. The analysis of p-values in Table 2
indicated that there is not suf?cient evidence to accept H1
a
or H1
b
. This means that the
use of IT does not show a different pattern according to sector in terms of recruitment,
and maintenance and development functions. This can also be interpreted as that the
use of IT has no impact according to sector for these HRM functions. It can also be
observed from the last column in Table 2 that the p-value is 0.01 for H2
c
and we accept
this hypothesis. This means that the use of IT shows signi?cantly different patterns
according to sector and hence has signi?cant impact in terms of management and
planning tasks.
Types of IT: The test results are summarized in Table 3. The last column of Table 3
shows that, except for hypothesis H2
c
, the results were found to be signi?cant at 5
percent signi?cance level in this category. This means that the type of IT tool used for
recruitment and maintenance and development functions varies among organizations
and has impact on these functions. On the other hand, the p-value for H2
c
indicated
that there is not suf?cient evidence to accept the hypothesis that the type of IT tool
used varies for management and planning function.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 252
Table 2: Test results for the impact of IT according to sector for HR
functions
Dependent variable Test variables Hypothesis F-value d.f. p-value*
Sector
Recruitment H1
a
1.81 2/9 0.22
Maintenance and
development H1
b
0.88 2/9 0.45
Management and
planning H1
c
7.09 2/9 0.01
*table values are at a ?ve percent signi?cance level.
Table 3: Table 3: Test results for the impact of types of IT on HR
functions
Dependent variable Test variables Hypothesis F-value d.f. p-value*
Sector
Recruitment H2
a
3.07 3/32 0.04
Maintenance and
development H2
b
2.74 3/32 0.05
Management and
planning H2
c
0.78 3/32 0.52
*table values are at a ?ve percent signi?cance level.
Discussion
This study found that more than 90 percent of the organizations use computers/IT for
HR functions in general. This is in line with the studies reported by Watson Wyatt
Worldwide
91
and Towers Perrin
92
who respectively found that more than 90 percent and
75 percent of HR departments operate with some form of computerized HRIS.
According to their study, HR departments are also planning to increase investments in
HR related technologies in the immediate future.
According to our survey, all sectors use word processing, spreadsheet tools,
DBMS and Internet (81 percent) more for HRM tasks than DSS, expert systems,
executive information systems and reengineering tools. This is consistent with the
?ndings reported by Elliott & Tevavichulada
93
and Norris.
94
Their study revealed that,
windows programs for word processing, creating databases and creating spreadsheets
are the most commonly used programs in organizations. These programs are
ubiquitous and widely used for the different HRM tasks.
Probably the most important ?nding of this study is based on the test results,
which support the position that HR applications and the use of IT are not
comprehensively integrated and structured together as one single HR portal providing
service. The chi-square test results also showed that the type of IT used for different
HRM functions change signi?cantly between sectors (?
2
= 23.194, df=4, p-
value=0.000). This situation is expected to continue in the near future since most of
the respondents (71 percent) stated that their organizations have no plans to
restructure their human resource departments. This situation does not seem to be
con?ned to Turkey. Some managers may simply see technology as a means of
controlling, limiting and weakening their workforce.
95
In their study, Hannon et al.
96
pointed out that the poor utilization of HRISs is due to their perception by the
managers as being slow and in?exible and the quality of the data input being frequently
questionable. Thus such systems are not preferred for operations such as strategic
management or re-engineering the HR role.
97
However, HRIS consulting ?rm Insight
Consulting Partners (ICP)
98
observed that organizations are moving towards more
centralized and integrated HR and IT infrastructures. Therefore, it seems that, in future
there will be a proliferation of ERP implementation and its standardization thereof,
although some small and medium sized organizations may ?nd this process rather
expensive.
Recruitment
The present study revealed that the use of IT does not adopt different patterns
between sectors for recruitment tasks. Although it was found that private sector
organizations (73 percent) use IT more than government sector (52 percent) and
public sector (43 percent) organizations do for recruitment tasks, the difference was
not found to be statistically signi?cant (?
2
= 4.499, df=6, p-value=0.609). This con?icts
with the results reported by Elliott & Tevavichulada,
99
who found that government
sector organizations (70 percent) integrated computer software and recruitment tasks
slightly more than their private sector counterparts (69 percent). The reason for the
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 253
con?icting ?gures of our study is likely to be due to the constraints stated by law,
especially for recruitment using via the Internet and employee selection tasks in
Turkey, and the attitude of top managers towards using traditional procedures for
recruitment tasks in the government and public sector. This reasoning is also
consistent with that reported by Allen et al.,
100
and Othman and Teh.
101
Their studies
found that the necessary transformation in public sector governance and accountability
is likely to be blocked by an administrative culture that may be ill suited to the digital
world.
Interestingly, the government sector (91 percent) is far ahead of the public (71
percent) and private sector (76 percent) organizations in IT applications for the
position inventory task of recruitment. One plausible explanation for this result is that
the government sector organizations included in our sample are generally much larger
in scale and characterized by over employment and thus position inventory operations
cannot be handled ef?ciently without using IT.
Our test results also indicated that the type of the IT tool used for recruitment
tasks has signi?cant impact. It was interesting to ?nd that, regardless of sector, ICT (30
percent) was identi?ed to be the second highest used tool for recruitment tasks. This is
probably due to the fact that the users who have experience with information and
communication technologies prefer Internet and network technologies for their
information and service needs.
102
Maintenance and Development
Similar to recruitment the test results indicated that use of IT does not show different
patterns between sectors for maintenance and development tasks. However, type of IT
tool used has been found to vary in terms of maintenance and development tasks.
Additionally, only 29 percent of the respondents’ organizations declared that the use of
software falls into the information system software category. These contradictory
?ndings are strong indications of the fact that although the use of IT for maintenance
and development tasks is pervasive, their IT implementations are not systematic and
mature yet.
The private sector (56 percent) uses IT more than the government (27 percent)
and public sectors (34 percent) for maintenance and development functions. These
?gures are in line with those of Budhwar and Boyne,
103
who reported that Indian
private sector ?rms have adopted a more rational approach than their public sector
counterparts in this category. One of the reasons may be that although the private
sector employs less people, the maintenance and development of their human
resources is vital for their existence and IT seems to be the only effective solution in
this respect. However, the difference was not found to be signi?cant (?2= 3.044, df=6,
p-value=0.803) in our study.
Interestingly, organizations in all sectors use IT almost equally for training and HR
development task (61 percent on average) of maintenance and development. This
?nding is also supported by Budhwar and Boyne,
104
who concluded that the training
and development tasks present a similar picture for both private and public sector
organizations. It was also interesting to ?nd that application software (49 percent) and
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 254
ICT (30 percent) are the mostly used tools for this task. This is to be expected since
recent technologies such as multimedia, e-learning, distance education etc. are
providing innovative and exciting teaching tools for society and most of the
organizations intend to make use of such recent technologies.
105
However, private organizations use information technology practices more for
performance evaluation, employee turnover and absenteeism analysis tasks. This is
consistent with Elliott & Tevavichulada,
106
who reported that 74 percent of private
sector organizations and 59 percent of government sector organizations use IT for
tasks related to the performance appraisal of employees. Of the available tools,
application software (46 percent) was found to be the mostly used.
Management and Planning
The test results indicated that the use of IT signi?cantly shows different patterns
according to sector and the type of the IT tool used among organizations does not vary
for management and planning tasks.
On average, government (69 percent) and public (64 percent) sector
organizations use IT slightly more than their private sector counterparts (60 percent)
for HR management and planning. This seems to be logical as the number and content
of activities falling into this category is large in the government and public sectors and
they are required to be regularly documented by the central government authorities.
Furthermore, most of these activities are standardized in terms of both quantity and
quality in these sectors. The difference between sectors was not found to be signi?cant
(?
2
=1.361, df = 4, p-value = 0,851). This result is also supported by Budhwar and
Boyne,
107
who concluded that the gap between the Indian private and public sectors is
not signi?cant. Application software was found to be the mostly used tool for
government (47 percent), public (58 percent) and private (46 percent) sector
organizations for this function.
This study, interestingly, obtained contradictory ?gures for the tasks in this
category. Our ?ndings reveal that the government and public sectors use IT more than
the private sector for bene?t administration and government report tasks. The
respective ?gures for the government are 91 percent and 73 percent, for the public 71
percent and 79 percent, and for the private 54 percent and 69 percent. One plausible
explanation is that these tasks are required in a standard form by law for the
government and public sectors and computerization is naturally the most effective way
to accomplish this. On the other hand, the private sector uses IT more in maintaining
personnel ?les and skills inventory tasks (77 percent) in comparison to the
government (68 percent) and public (71 percent) sectors. This is because, when
compared to private sector organizations, skills (background) required for different
positions are standardized in the government and public sectors and additional skills
might affect the employee’s position only at the recruitment stage. Furthermore, these
?les contain con?dential data most of the time and managers tend to rely on traditional
approaches in this case.
108
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 255
Conclusion
As a consequence of the advancement of information technologies and evolvement of
e-HR organizations have become more competitive by reducing costs and improving
productivity, quality and pro?tability in HRM area.
109
Modern businesses and industries
are taking suitable steps for the implementation of IT in the key area of the
management of human resources by enabling the employees to make their optimum
contribution to the gaining of a competitive advantage.
This study investigates the extent and comparative impact of IT use on HRM
functions in organizations from different sectors. It has also taken into account the
usage pattern of different IT tools to perform different HRM functions in organizations.
Based on the survey data, the results ?rstly indicated that IT has signi?cant impact on
all sectors in terms of management and planning tasks and, secondly, that type of IT
used varies signi?cantly for the tasks of recruitment, and maintenance and
development functions.
The ?ndings also support the conclusion that the use of IT is pervasive in the
organizations for their HRM activities. However, there is no standardization in the
integration of computer software into main HRM activities. This may be explained by
the gap between job requirements and the ability of employees to perform HRM tasks.
Low levels of integration of software and HRM functions can be related to fear based on
ignorance and low levels of knowledge and training in IT. In general, organizations do
not have portals exclusively for HR functions and use different computer software for
similar HRM functions. This also means that these technologies are not systematically
and maturely used for HRM functions included in the analysis in Turkey and this
situation is expected to continue in the near future. With this backdrop, HR
departments should spend more attention to the education and training of employees
in HRM departments in the area of IT.
Future empirical studies should examine the impact of IT on more HR functions
in different organizations in other parts of the world to make a comprehensive
assessment. Futhermore, in Turkey this study could also be conducted with more
breadth and depth in terms of HRM functions and IT tools.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank editor and reviewers for their valuable comments to improve
the quality of this paper. We would also like to thank Dr. Ceylan Ertung- Academic
Writing & Advisory Center (AWAC) of Atilim University for nicely editing the
manuscript.
Notes
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Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 261
Authors
Alok Mishra, PhD
Department of Computer Engineering
Atilim University
Incek 06836
Ankara Turkey
90-312-5868377
[email protected]
Ibrahim Akman, PhD
Department of Computer Engineering
Atilim University
Incek 06836
Ankara Turkey
90-312-5868377
Dr. Alok Mishra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Software Engineering at
Atilim University, Ankara, Turkey. He holds a PhD in computer science-software engi-
neering in addition to dual master’s degrees in computer science and applications and
human resource management. His areas of interest and research are software engineer-
ing, information system, information and knowledge management and object oriented
analysis and design. He has published articles, book chapters and book-reviews related
to software engineering and information system in refereed journals, books and confer-
ences. Dr. Mishra is also editorial board member of many journals including Computer
Standards and Interfaces, Journal of Universal Computer Science, Computing & Infor-
matics, Electronic Government- an International Journal etc. Dr. Mishra has extensive
experience in distance education related to computers and management courses. He
has received excellence in online education award by U21Global Singapore. He had also
served as chief examiner computer science of the International Baccalaureate (IB)
organization. He is recipient of various scholarships including national merit scholarship
and department of information technology scholarship of Government of India.
Dr. K. Ibrahim Akman is professor and chair of the Computer Engineering Depart-
ment at Atilim University. He obtained his PhD in operations research from Lancaster
University (U.K.) in 1984. Akman has served on the editorial boards of the Electronic
Journal of e-Government and the International Journal of Information Technology
and Management (IJITM). Software, piracy, e-government, human resource manage-
ment and data compression are among his current ?elds of interest. Akman has pub-
lished more than 45 articles in conferences and journals, including Studies in
Educational Evaluation, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Microelectronics
and Reliability, the Journal of Information Science, Government Information Quarter-
ly, the International Journal of Information Management and Behaviour and Infor-
mation Technology.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 262
doc_984523754.pdf
The HRM function in organizations has gained increasing strategic emphasis, and the importance of its alignment HRM and business strategies is well-acknowledged. In fact, effective HRM is vital in order to be able to meet the market demands with well-qualified employees at all times.
Information Technology
in Human Resource
Management: An
Empirical Assessment
By Alok Mishra, PhD, and Ibrahim Akman, PhD
The present paper begins by introducing a number of observations on the
applications of information technology (IT) in the field of human resource
management (HRM) in general. This is due to the fact that IT and its wide range of
applications have already made their presence felt in this area. This will be
followed by a report on the findings of a survey on the present trends in
organizations with in the different sectors in Turkey. Although the impact of IT on
HRM has long been attracting the interest of academics, no empirical research has
ever been realized in this field in Turkey, and few studies have been reported
elsewhere. The survey was conducted among the 106 IT managers and
professionals from various sectors, based on whose results, the data shows that IT
is used extensively in the organizations to perform HRM functions in Turkey’s
dynamic economy. The results also indicated that, while IT has an impact on all
sectors in terms of HRM to certain extent, the types of IT used vary significantly
between recruitment, maintenance, and development tasks. However, the empirical
results here reveal that these organizations are not applying these technologies
systematically and maturely in the performance of HRM functions.
Keywords: Human Resource Management (HRM), Human Resource Management
System (HRMS), Human Resource (HR), Information Technology (IT), ANOVA test,
Chi-square test.
T
he HRM function in organizations has gained increasing strategic emphasis, and
the importance of its alignment HRM and business strategies is well-acknowl-
edged.
1
In fact, effective HRM is vital in order to be able to meet the market
demands with well-quali?ed employees at all times.
2
Technology and HRM have a broad range of in?uences upon each other, and HR
professionals should be able to adopt technologies that allow the reengineering of the
HR function, be prepared to support organizational and work-design changes caused
by technology, and be able to support a proper managerial climate for innovative and
knowledge-based organizations.
3
These technological advances are being driven
primarily by strong demands from human resource professionals for enhancement in
speed, effectiveness, and cost containment.
4
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 243
Snell, Stueber, and Lepak
5
observe that HRMSs can meet the challenge of
simultaneously becoming more strategic, ?exible, cost-ef?cient, and customer-oriented
by leveraging information technology. Many experts forecast that the PC will become
the central tool for all HR professionals.
6
Virtual HR is emerging due to the growing
sophistication of IT and increased external structural options.
7
IT is beginning to
enable organizations to deliver state-of-the-art HR services, and reduced costs have
enabled companies, regardless of the ?rm size-to purchase HR technologies.
8
One of the impacts of IT is that it enables the creation of an IT- based workplace,
9
which leads to what should be a manager’s top priority-namely, strategic competence
management.
10
Advances in IT hold the promise of meeting many of the challenges of
HRM, such as attracting, retaining, and motivating employees, meeting the demands
for a more strategic HR function, and managing the “human element” of technological
change in the future.
11
HRM could support the efforts of technological innovation’s to
achieve high performance while such innovation; itself could serve as an approach to
enable the HR function to focus more on value-added activities in order to realize the
full potential of technology and organizational strategy.
12
The biggest bene?t of using
IT in HRM to organizations is the freeing of HR staff from intermediary roles, thus
enabling them to concentrate on strategic planning in human resource organization
and development.
13
Caudron
14
has also observed that IT can automate other routine
tasks such as payroll processing, bene?ts administration, and transactional activities, so
that HR professionals are free to focus on more strategic matters such as boosting
productivity.
In the present context of increasing globalization, employing organizations and
their environments have become increasingly complex. Managers in these
organizations face growing dif?culties in coping with workforces that may be spread
across a variety of countries, cultures and political systems. Given such trends, IT has
considerable potential as a tool that managers can utilize, both generally and in human
resourcing functions in particular to increase the capabilities of the organization.
15
Substantial bene?ts of communication and information technologies can
seamlessly migrate to HR applications.
16
Those managing the human resource
functions have not ignored such advice and, as a result a widespread use of human
resource information systems (HRIS) has taking place.
17
An HRIS is a systematic
procedure for collecting, storing, maintaining, retrieving and validating the data
needed by an organization for its human resources, personnel activities and
organization unit characteristics.
18
HRISs can also provide the management with a
decision-making tool rather than merely a robust database.
19
Turek
20
offers numerous
examples of how HR technology has reduced the response time and enhanced the
quality of HR service in the workplace.
A research paper by a Cincinnati, Ohio-based HRIS consulting ?rm, Insight
Consulting Partners (ICP),
21
notes that enterprise applications tend to push
organizations toward more centralized and integrated HR and IT infrastructures. Thus,
HRIS can support long-term planning with information for labor force planning as well
as supply and demand forecasts, staf?ng with information on equal employment,
separations and applicant quali?cations, and development with information on training
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 244
program costs and trainee work performance. It can also support compensation
programs, salary forecasts, pay budgets, labor/employee relations with information on
contract negotiations, and employee assistance needs.
22
Doran,
23
a consultant with more than 25 years of experience, insists that behind
every successful HRIS implementation there is a thorough need analysis. Further,
literature suggests that success in the implementation phase relies on the ability of
managers to manage change.
24
Another organizational challenge is the creation of performance metrics to assess
the value-added contribution of new HRIS initiatives.
25
An extensive body of literature exists on the usage, adoption, and implementation
of IT.
26
However, most of the existing studies have focused on the use of IT in general.
27
Regrettably, empirical studies and the theory on how IT in?uences organizations is still
underdeveloped.
28
One area receiving little attention in the research on successful IT
use is HRM practice.
29
In particular, there are three new areas of development which
need more empirical research and application: the information technology innovation
and e-HR developmental approaches, the globally distributed engineering and
international technology entrepreneurship, professional service, and customer
relations management modeling.
30
This is further supported by Shrivastava and Shaw’s
31
observations that, despite
evidence of increasing use of HR related technology by individual ?rms, there has been
little theory development in this area. Similar observations demonstrate that the
existing literature has paid little attention to assessing the impact of IT on HRM in
various organizations in different sectors in a systematic way. Studies conducted by
Elliott & Tevavichulada
32
and Currie
33
represent some progress in this direction. They
have indicated that the sector in which the organization operates is signi?cant in terms
of in?uencing the structure of IT activities.
Some authors have also attempted to identify differences of the role of IT
between services and process oriented industries, and found signi?cant differences.
34
Most of the existing studies were conducted in western Europe and in the United
States, and their result may not be applicable to the other parts of the world due to
social and economical differences.
35
Comparatively, very little has been researched in
this ?eld in the developing countries.
Turkey is a relatively highly populated republic, and is the world’s 17th most
industrialized nation. Turkey has undergone a series of major changes throughout the
last decade, such as entrance into Customs Union with the European Union (EU) in
1996 and the inclusion on the list of candidate countries for membership in 1999.
36
These changes have had a certain impact on organizations’ HRM strategies and, as such,
these organizations have started to invest signi?cant resources in automating their HR
departments. Most of the research in this ?eld in the country is based on rather general
HRM issues, including as the need for international approach in HRM,
37
globalization
and HRM,
38
computer-aided human resource evaluation in organizations,
39
scheduling
jobs through multiple parallel channels by an expert system,
40
success factors in
women’s career advancement,
41
national pro?les and regional differences,
42
impact of
culture,
43
individual tendencies
44
and leadership values.
45
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 245
Most relevant to this study appears to be the articles by Ardic and Bas
46
and Iraz
and Yildirim.
47
Ardic and Bas
48
investigating public and private universities concluded
that such universities differ signi?cantly in terms of job satisfaction. Although their
study, in a way, provides a comparative analysis between public and private sector
organizations, it is limited to academic institutions and is not concerned with the
impact of IT on job satisfaction as for their part. Iraz and Yildirim
49
studied the impact
of IT applications on HRM. However, they have only considered the banking sector in
Turkey and their study is limited to the investigation of the role of e-learning. Another
salient point is that research sponsored by organizations in different sectors has only
been devoted to ?nding quick solutions to their own HRM problems.
50
Thus, none of
the existing literature in Turkey, to the best of our knowledge, has studied the impact of
IT on HRM activities from a more general perspective.
Due to these conditions this study investigates in what ways organizations from
different sectors are using IT technologies to perform various HRM functions in an
effective way in Turkey. Here, organizations were selected from government, public and
private sectors to ascertain IT’s impact and its implementation to perform HRM
functions in a systematic way. For the purpose of this study the term “government”
refers to national government departments. We used “public” as the third category
since it represents institutions which are concerned with decentralized services such as
universities, local government, healthcare and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) aimed at providing nonpro?t public services and hence do not easily fall into
private or government sector category. Such a categorization is relevant insofar as the
differences exist in the mission statements of these sectors.
51
Furthermore, this study
attempts to identify those IT tools and technologies which are popular, alongside their
rate of implementation in HRM in organizations.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows: The following section
introduces the evolution of HRM systems from an early stage to the present through a
review of associated literature. This is followed by research methodology. The results of
the study are then presented and discussed. Finally, the paper ends with the conclusion
and future research directions.
Trends in the Utilization of IT in Human Resource
Management
Given the scope of human resource management functions, an effective HRMS must
address a range of administrative, statutory, functional and technological requirements
in order to enable the HRMS to support the partnership between HR professionals,
program managers, ?nance staff, executives and employees; while also providing
accurate, reliable information for organization-wide planning and decision-making.
52
Companies are also advised to establish long-term relationships with technology
vendors.
53
Surveys have shown that more than 90 percent of HR departments operate with
some form of computerized HRMS.
54
In a survey undertaken by the Institute of
Manpower Studies, a number of key changes were found to have an impact on the use
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 246
of HRMSs.
55
These changes included the development of the HR function itself, which
resulted in the closure of many centralized IT functions, and today, the majority of HR
applications are networked.
In the mid-1990s, due to business process reengineering and integration of
information from diverse applications, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) became
popular among organizations. Watson Wyatt Worldwide
56
(now Towers Watson)
discovered in a survey of 649 ?rms that nearly every organization had made signi?cant
investments in some combination of enterprise resource panning (ERP), HR service
centers, interactive voice response (IVR), voice recognition systems (VRS), Web
applications and employee portals. The value of ERP is its ability to integrate other
functions with HR under a single vendor and common technology standards. In the
leading ERP systems some of the HRMS components permit the use of the internet to
reduce transaction costs.
57
For example, the HRM capability of the PeopleSoft package
(one type of ERP software) was used to track the movements of 5,000 employees across
70 locations and calculate their salaries accurately. Consequently, when operational
bene?t in payroll processing was considered, cycle time was reduced from four days to
four hours. Thus, accurate, time-effective information delivered to managers improved
the speed and quality of decision making and assisted cost control.
58
Moreover, in
keeping with changing demand patterns, most ERP vendors have introduced second-
generation Web-based HRISs that are easier to integrate with other applications.
59
Also, by integrating ?nancial and HRMS applications, the value of the HR function
itself has increased for the organization as a whole and now, in the best administrative
systems, HRMS is a subset of ERP software solutions. One of the key values of
enterprise applications is that they force companies to adopt a cross-functional view of
the organization and lead to the integration of information and processes.
60
Ashbaugh
& Miranda
61
outline a number of advantages or justi?cations regarding the selection of
enterprise HRMS solutions.
Observations of some current trends and attitudes held by industry related
organizations provide a ?tting conclusion to this section. In the 2001 Human Resources
Self-Service/Portal Survey prepared by Cedar, a software consulting and services
company,
62
it was reported that HRMSs are used for such employee productivity
applications as communications (e.g. employee manuals, corporate policies,
directories, frequently asked questions), retirement services, enrollment for health
bene?ts, bene?t enquiries and training registration. In systems expanded to include
managerial productivity applications, this survey study reports that the most widely
offered services are travel and expense management, the supply of request forms for
new employees, time card approval and reporting, budget analysis, and such
managerial reports as head count salary listings and timesheets.
63
With the “e-wave” also reaching the area of HRM, the terms e-HR or e-HRM are
being used increasingly when referring to the next development stage in IT-based
HRM.
64
A recent development in the functionality of HRM systems has been the
transition from client/server-based systems to Web-based access. This has resulted in
new options for “self-service” routines for various HR functions.
65
In terms of e-
business, the implications for the HR function are not yet fully visible, but it is certain
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 247
that e-HR will revolutionize the HR function within the next few years. The main
challenge in e-HR is the alignment of processes in the HR function according to the
future e-business challenge.
66
In most companies, the shift to e-HR from a paper-
intensive environment represents a signi?cant cultural change, particularly for
employees.
67
These e-HR systems also offer various search capabilities, such as those
for conducting organization-wide searches related to global staf?ng as well as extensive
report generation options.
68
A survey reported that more than 80 percent of respondents used or had plans to
use an HR portal tool in 2003 and organizations are using HR portals for company
communication (50 percent), employee handbooks and policies (44 percent),
work/life information and links (30 percent), bene?ts enrollment (25 percent), training
(25 percent), employee message board (22 percent), HR record keeping (22 percent)
and in areas other including recruitment and employment information (?ve percent).
69
Research Methodology
Research Model
The present study performs a systematic and exploratory analysis approach to
investigate the impact of IT applications on HRM functions. The hypotheses were
categorized according to the following empirical factors:
• Use of IT
• Type of IT tools.
The justi?cation for each empirical factor and the corresponding hypotheses are
provided below.
Use of IT
IT can bring numerous improvements to organizations.
70
Snell, Stueber and
Lepak
71
pointed out that IT has the potential to lower administrative costs,
increase productivity, lower speed response times, improve decision making and
enhance customer service, simultaneously. The effective management of human
resources also has an important role to play in the performance and success of
organizations.
72
However, despite evidence of the increasing use of HR-related
technology by individual ?rms, there has been little theory development in this
area and academia has failed to give the impact of IT on HR in organizations from
different sectors the attention it deserves.
73
Raghunathan and Raghunathan
74
reported the existence of differences in
structuring and managing IT activities between organizations from different
sectors. Currie
75
supported the view that the relationship between organization
structure and IT are sector speci?c. In other words, private and public sector
organizations adopt an organizational structure to meet the different demands
from their immediate environments and this will be re?ected in the way IT is
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 248
structured. According to Laursen,
76
it is unlikely that new innovative HRM
practices will be equally effective across different sectors. On the other hand,
Budhwar and Boyne
77
compared HRM practices in public and private sector
organizations and their results showed a number of differences in the HRM
systems in these sectors. The key areas of their analysis include recruitment and
selection, pay and bene?ts, training and development, employee relations with
emphasis on key HRM strategies. These may be taken as evidence of the fact that
the impact of IT on HRM functions may show differences between sectors.
The present study therefore proposes the following hypotheses:
H1
a
: The use of IT adopts a different pattern according to the different sector
for recruitment tasks.
H1
b
: The use of IT adopts a different pattern according to the different sector
for maintenance and development tasks.
H1
c
: The use of IT adopts a different pattern according to the different sector
for management and planning tasks.
Types of IT
A computer that runs faster with a great deal of storage space and high resolution
graphics capability is useless without software that ?ts the organizations’ needs.
78
According to Calhoun et al.,
79
IT is an important component of the organizational
decision process. The use of IT is always based on the needs of an organization
and the nature of information systems varies depending on the particular form
taken by the organization.
80
Some researchers investigated the relationship
between organization characteristics and the use of IT, and factors in?uencing the
use of IT in organizations.
Seyal et al.
81
examined the extent of use of IT in various small and medium
business organizations in Brunei Darussalam. Their study attempted to assess the
depth and breadth of IT usage in business. They concluded that the chief
executive’s computer knowledge is positively associated with the use of IT and
that businesses in different sectors have different information processing needs.
Calhoun et al.
82
also studied the impact of national culture on information
technology usage in organizations and reported the association between some
organizational characteristics and use of IT.
On the other hand, culture, control and competition as the constitution of
subjectivity, determine the locus of IT application in organizations.
83
These
studies do not consider the relationship between types of software used in
organizations and their internal operations. It is evident from previous studies
that types of IT tools in HRM functions were given due consideration.
84
Elliott and
Tevavichulada
85
bring some data that shed light on the types of software
applications taking place in HRM and their integration to HRM activities. The
results of their study reveal that most software applications used in both sectors
are not signi?cantly different except for in terms of statistics and utility programs.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 249
Their study does not provide a comparative analysis on the types of software used
for different HRM functions. They also pointed out that their sampling technique
captures only one point in time and it is expected that the number of
organizations integrating software and HRM functions will be constantly growing
with the passage of time.
Against this backdrop, it is worth to analyze the usage pattern of the types of
software for the main HRM functions and to this end, our hypotheses are
postulated as follows:
H2
a
: Type of IT tool used varies according to recruitment tasks.
H2
b
: Type of IT tool used varies according to maintenance and development
tasks.
H2
c
: Type of IT tools used varies according to management and planning tasks.
Research Instrument and the Data
A survey approach was adopted for this study and the data was obtained by means of a
questionnaire prepared in Turkish. Thorough discussions were held with HRM experts
to ?nalize the items of the questionnaire. Several HRM managers were interviewed in
this regard and their suggestions were included as much as possible. Following this, a
pilot version of the research instrument was developed and distributed to a group of IT
professionals to obtain their suggestions and clari?cations.
The questionnaire contains seven questions which involve seven variables to
meet the objectives of this research (Table 1). It is structured in nature and does not
contain any open ended questions. The respondents are required to choose one or
more of the alternatives for questions 3-6. The range of values for questions 4-6 also
shows the tasks for the corresponding HRM functions.
The respondents were the managers of IT divisions of major government, public
and private sector organizations, who were also regular attendees of the annual
workshop on the use of IT in organizations organized by the Turkish Informatics
Association. The invitations were limited to 200 organizations and the distribution of
invitations among sectors was based on “judgement sampling”. A total of 104
completed survey questionnaires were received, giving a response rate of 52 per cent.
The variables are grouped in two categories as dependent and independent
variables. The proposed dependent variables of this study are “sector” and “IT tools”
while the independent variables are “recruitment”, “maintenance and development,”
“management and planning,” “IT use” and “restructure”.
Recruitment, development and maintenance, along with management and
planning are selected as independent variables since they play important roles in
shaping employee behavior.
86
Besides, almost all of the human resource management
application software system provide features corresponding to these variables for the
success of organizations.
87
Furthermore, as there is a scarcity of this type of research
and as the selected variables have not been used by any other known study in this
context, it is also sensible to compare these basic HR functions.
88
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 250
The ANOVA test was selected to test the hypotheses. The ANOVA test provides a
nonparametric alternative to the one-way analysis of variance and is robust in its
resistance to the outliers and errors in the data relative to the usual normal theory F
test.
89
The chi-square test method is used whenever there is a need to examine the
relationship between the dependent and independent variables.
90
Results
The sectors of six respondents are not known and these are not included in the
analysis. The distribution of the remaining respondents is as follows: 44 (45 percent)
are from government, 28 (28 percent) are from public and 26 (27 percent) are from
private sector organizations.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 251
Table 1: Summary of research questions and variables
Quest. Var. De?nition Range of values
1 Sector In which sector is your Government, public, private
organization?
2 IT use Are your organization’s daily Yes/No
HRM operations heavily
reliant on computers and IT?
3 IT tools What types of IT tools are Application software (such as DBMS,
used to accomplish HR spreadsheets, data mining/data
functions? warehousing), information system software
(such as decision support systems, execu-
tive information systems, expert systems),
information and communication technolo-
gies (ICT) (such as LAN/WAN/neural
network, internet/intranet, web portals)
4 Recruitment For which of the following Position inventory, recruitment using
recruitment tasks does your Internet, employee selection, employee
organization use management and workforce planning
computers/IT?
5 Maintenance For which of the following Training and human resource development,
and maintenance and performance evaluation, employee turnover,
development development tasks does tardiness and absenteeism analysis
your organization use
computers/IT?
6 Management For which of the following Personnel ?les and skills inventory, bene?t
and planning management and planning administration, government reports,
tasks does your organization succession planning and implementation
use computers/IT?
7 Restructure Does your organization have Yes/No
any plans to improve IT use
for its HRM department
Use of IT: The test results are reported in Table 2. The analysis of p-values in Table 2
indicated that there is not suf?cient evidence to accept H1
a
or H1
b
. This means that the
use of IT does not show a different pattern according to sector in terms of recruitment,
and maintenance and development functions. This can also be interpreted as that the
use of IT has no impact according to sector for these HRM functions. It can also be
observed from the last column in Table 2 that the p-value is 0.01 for H2
c
and we accept
this hypothesis. This means that the use of IT shows signi?cantly different patterns
according to sector and hence has signi?cant impact in terms of management and
planning tasks.
Types of IT: The test results are summarized in Table 3. The last column of Table 3
shows that, except for hypothesis H2
c
, the results were found to be signi?cant at 5
percent signi?cance level in this category. This means that the type of IT tool used for
recruitment and maintenance and development functions varies among organizations
and has impact on these functions. On the other hand, the p-value for H2
c
indicated
that there is not suf?cient evidence to accept the hypothesis that the type of IT tool
used varies for management and planning function.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 252
Table 2: Test results for the impact of IT according to sector for HR
functions
Dependent variable Test variables Hypothesis F-value d.f. p-value*
Sector
Recruitment H1
a
1.81 2/9 0.22
Maintenance and
development H1
b
0.88 2/9 0.45
Management and
planning H1
c
7.09 2/9 0.01
*table values are at a ?ve percent signi?cance level.
Table 3: Table 3: Test results for the impact of types of IT on HR
functions
Dependent variable Test variables Hypothesis F-value d.f. p-value*
Sector
Recruitment H2
a
3.07 3/32 0.04
Maintenance and
development H2
b
2.74 3/32 0.05
Management and
planning H2
c
0.78 3/32 0.52
*table values are at a ?ve percent signi?cance level.
Discussion
This study found that more than 90 percent of the organizations use computers/IT for
HR functions in general. This is in line with the studies reported by Watson Wyatt
Worldwide
91
and Towers Perrin
92
who respectively found that more than 90 percent and
75 percent of HR departments operate with some form of computerized HRIS.
According to their study, HR departments are also planning to increase investments in
HR related technologies in the immediate future.
According to our survey, all sectors use word processing, spreadsheet tools,
DBMS and Internet (81 percent) more for HRM tasks than DSS, expert systems,
executive information systems and reengineering tools. This is consistent with the
?ndings reported by Elliott & Tevavichulada
93
and Norris.
94
Their study revealed that,
windows programs for word processing, creating databases and creating spreadsheets
are the most commonly used programs in organizations. These programs are
ubiquitous and widely used for the different HRM tasks.
Probably the most important ?nding of this study is based on the test results,
which support the position that HR applications and the use of IT are not
comprehensively integrated and structured together as one single HR portal providing
service. The chi-square test results also showed that the type of IT used for different
HRM functions change signi?cantly between sectors (?
2
= 23.194, df=4, p-
value=0.000). This situation is expected to continue in the near future since most of
the respondents (71 percent) stated that their organizations have no plans to
restructure their human resource departments. This situation does not seem to be
con?ned to Turkey. Some managers may simply see technology as a means of
controlling, limiting and weakening their workforce.
95
In their study, Hannon et al.
96
pointed out that the poor utilization of HRISs is due to their perception by the
managers as being slow and in?exible and the quality of the data input being frequently
questionable. Thus such systems are not preferred for operations such as strategic
management or re-engineering the HR role.
97
However, HRIS consulting ?rm Insight
Consulting Partners (ICP)
98
observed that organizations are moving towards more
centralized and integrated HR and IT infrastructures. Therefore, it seems that, in future
there will be a proliferation of ERP implementation and its standardization thereof,
although some small and medium sized organizations may ?nd this process rather
expensive.
Recruitment
The present study revealed that the use of IT does not adopt different patterns
between sectors for recruitment tasks. Although it was found that private sector
organizations (73 percent) use IT more than government sector (52 percent) and
public sector (43 percent) organizations do for recruitment tasks, the difference was
not found to be statistically signi?cant (?
2
= 4.499, df=6, p-value=0.609). This con?icts
with the results reported by Elliott & Tevavichulada,
99
who found that government
sector organizations (70 percent) integrated computer software and recruitment tasks
slightly more than their private sector counterparts (69 percent). The reason for the
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 253
con?icting ?gures of our study is likely to be due to the constraints stated by law,
especially for recruitment using via the Internet and employee selection tasks in
Turkey, and the attitude of top managers towards using traditional procedures for
recruitment tasks in the government and public sector. This reasoning is also
consistent with that reported by Allen et al.,
100
and Othman and Teh.
101
Their studies
found that the necessary transformation in public sector governance and accountability
is likely to be blocked by an administrative culture that may be ill suited to the digital
world.
Interestingly, the government sector (91 percent) is far ahead of the public (71
percent) and private sector (76 percent) organizations in IT applications for the
position inventory task of recruitment. One plausible explanation for this result is that
the government sector organizations included in our sample are generally much larger
in scale and characterized by over employment and thus position inventory operations
cannot be handled ef?ciently without using IT.
Our test results also indicated that the type of the IT tool used for recruitment
tasks has signi?cant impact. It was interesting to ?nd that, regardless of sector, ICT (30
percent) was identi?ed to be the second highest used tool for recruitment tasks. This is
probably due to the fact that the users who have experience with information and
communication technologies prefer Internet and network technologies for their
information and service needs.
102
Maintenance and Development
Similar to recruitment the test results indicated that use of IT does not show different
patterns between sectors for maintenance and development tasks. However, type of IT
tool used has been found to vary in terms of maintenance and development tasks.
Additionally, only 29 percent of the respondents’ organizations declared that the use of
software falls into the information system software category. These contradictory
?ndings are strong indications of the fact that although the use of IT for maintenance
and development tasks is pervasive, their IT implementations are not systematic and
mature yet.
The private sector (56 percent) uses IT more than the government (27 percent)
and public sectors (34 percent) for maintenance and development functions. These
?gures are in line with those of Budhwar and Boyne,
103
who reported that Indian
private sector ?rms have adopted a more rational approach than their public sector
counterparts in this category. One of the reasons may be that although the private
sector employs less people, the maintenance and development of their human
resources is vital for their existence and IT seems to be the only effective solution in
this respect. However, the difference was not found to be signi?cant (?2= 3.044, df=6,
p-value=0.803) in our study.
Interestingly, organizations in all sectors use IT almost equally for training and HR
development task (61 percent on average) of maintenance and development. This
?nding is also supported by Budhwar and Boyne,
104
who concluded that the training
and development tasks present a similar picture for both private and public sector
organizations. It was also interesting to ?nd that application software (49 percent) and
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 254
ICT (30 percent) are the mostly used tools for this task. This is to be expected since
recent technologies such as multimedia, e-learning, distance education etc. are
providing innovative and exciting teaching tools for society and most of the
organizations intend to make use of such recent technologies.
105
However, private organizations use information technology practices more for
performance evaluation, employee turnover and absenteeism analysis tasks. This is
consistent with Elliott & Tevavichulada,
106
who reported that 74 percent of private
sector organizations and 59 percent of government sector organizations use IT for
tasks related to the performance appraisal of employees. Of the available tools,
application software (46 percent) was found to be the mostly used.
Management and Planning
The test results indicated that the use of IT signi?cantly shows different patterns
according to sector and the type of the IT tool used among organizations does not vary
for management and planning tasks.
On average, government (69 percent) and public (64 percent) sector
organizations use IT slightly more than their private sector counterparts (60 percent)
for HR management and planning. This seems to be logical as the number and content
of activities falling into this category is large in the government and public sectors and
they are required to be regularly documented by the central government authorities.
Furthermore, most of these activities are standardized in terms of both quantity and
quality in these sectors. The difference between sectors was not found to be signi?cant
(?
2
=1.361, df = 4, p-value = 0,851). This result is also supported by Budhwar and
Boyne,
107
who concluded that the gap between the Indian private and public sectors is
not signi?cant. Application software was found to be the mostly used tool for
government (47 percent), public (58 percent) and private (46 percent) sector
organizations for this function.
This study, interestingly, obtained contradictory ?gures for the tasks in this
category. Our ?ndings reveal that the government and public sectors use IT more than
the private sector for bene?t administration and government report tasks. The
respective ?gures for the government are 91 percent and 73 percent, for the public 71
percent and 79 percent, and for the private 54 percent and 69 percent. One plausible
explanation is that these tasks are required in a standard form by law for the
government and public sectors and computerization is naturally the most effective way
to accomplish this. On the other hand, the private sector uses IT more in maintaining
personnel ?les and skills inventory tasks (77 percent) in comparison to the
government (68 percent) and public (71 percent) sectors. This is because, when
compared to private sector organizations, skills (background) required for different
positions are standardized in the government and public sectors and additional skills
might affect the employee’s position only at the recruitment stage. Furthermore, these
?les contain con?dential data most of the time and managers tend to rely on traditional
approaches in this case.
108
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 255
Conclusion
As a consequence of the advancement of information technologies and evolvement of
e-HR organizations have become more competitive by reducing costs and improving
productivity, quality and pro?tability in HRM area.
109
Modern businesses and industries
are taking suitable steps for the implementation of IT in the key area of the
management of human resources by enabling the employees to make their optimum
contribution to the gaining of a competitive advantage.
This study investigates the extent and comparative impact of IT use on HRM
functions in organizations from different sectors. It has also taken into account the
usage pattern of different IT tools to perform different HRM functions in organizations.
Based on the survey data, the results ?rstly indicated that IT has signi?cant impact on
all sectors in terms of management and planning tasks and, secondly, that type of IT
used varies signi?cantly for the tasks of recruitment, and maintenance and
development functions.
The ?ndings also support the conclusion that the use of IT is pervasive in the
organizations for their HRM activities. However, there is no standardization in the
integration of computer software into main HRM activities. This may be explained by
the gap between job requirements and the ability of employees to perform HRM tasks.
Low levels of integration of software and HRM functions can be related to fear based on
ignorance and low levels of knowledge and training in IT. In general, organizations do
not have portals exclusively for HR functions and use different computer software for
similar HRM functions. This also means that these technologies are not systematically
and maturely used for HRM functions included in the analysis in Turkey and this
situation is expected to continue in the near future. With this backdrop, HR
departments should spend more attention to the education and training of employees
in HRM departments in the area of IT.
Future empirical studies should examine the impact of IT on more HR functions
in different organizations in other parts of the world to make a comprehensive
assessment. Futhermore, in Turkey this study could also be conducted with more
breadth and depth in terms of HRM functions and IT tools.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank editor and reviewers for their valuable comments to improve
the quality of this paper. We would also like to thank Dr. Ceylan Ertung- Academic
Writing & Advisory Center (AWAC) of Atilim University for nicely editing the
manuscript.
Notes
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Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 261
Authors
Alok Mishra, PhD
Department of Computer Engineering
Atilim University
Incek 06836
Ankara Turkey
90-312-5868377
[email protected]
Ibrahim Akman, PhD
Department of Computer Engineering
Atilim University
Incek 06836
Ankara Turkey
90-312-5868377
Dr. Alok Mishra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Software Engineering at
Atilim University, Ankara, Turkey. He holds a PhD in computer science-software engi-
neering in addition to dual master’s degrees in computer science and applications and
human resource management. His areas of interest and research are software engineer-
ing, information system, information and knowledge management and object oriented
analysis and design. He has published articles, book chapters and book-reviews related
to software engineering and information system in refereed journals, books and confer-
ences. Dr. Mishra is also editorial board member of many journals including Computer
Standards and Interfaces, Journal of Universal Computer Science, Computing & Infor-
matics, Electronic Government- an International Journal etc. Dr. Mishra has extensive
experience in distance education related to computers and management courses. He
has received excellence in online education award by U21Global Singapore. He had also
served as chief examiner computer science of the International Baccalaureate (IB)
organization. He is recipient of various scholarships including national merit scholarship
and department of information technology scholarship of Government of India.
Dr. K. Ibrahim Akman is professor and chair of the Computer Engineering Depart-
ment at Atilim University. He obtained his PhD in operations research from Lancaster
University (U.K.) in 1984. Akman has served on the editorial boards of the Electronic
Journal of e-Government and the International Journal of Information Technology
and Management (IJITM). Software, piracy, e-government, human resource manage-
ment and data compression are among his current ?elds of interest. Akman has pub-
lished more than 45 articles in conferences and journals, including Studies in
Educational Evaluation, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Microelectronics
and Reliability, the Journal of Information Science, Government Information Quarter-
ly, the International Journal of Information Management and Behaviour and Infor-
mation Technology.
Public Personnel Management Volume 39 No. 3 Fall 2010 262
doc_984523754.pdf