Abstract
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, both practitioners and academics faced surmountable issues that created a massive toll on both organizations and employees. The new complexities surrounding organizations call for novel approaches in understanding the future of work and its components. HR carries a critical strategic function for organizations to adapt to the various complexities and develop strategies that enable them to manage people when uncertainty prevails. The “ecosystem” emerged as a concept that drove theoretical and HR strategy discussions in the last two decades. Its advancement reflects a growing interest regarding the interdependence in elements, structures, and actors across organizations and activities. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the critical importance of interconnectedness for surviving in today's highly volatile environment. Thus, this work proposes a preliminary theoretical model of the HR ecosystem in the COVID-19 context using the arguments of systems and complexity theories and the current HR literature.
TopIntroduction
Organizations are complex and dynamic structures where diverse units, teams, and people interact to pursue the objectives and plans that are constantly evolving to meet the expectations of today's highly volatile environment. Groundbreaking technological developments, rapidly changing environmental conditions, and social, political, and economic crises enormously impact organizations and business systems. The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the effects of these trends and crises on how we understand, organize, and do business (Minbaeva, 2021). This experience calls for a shift in defining, positioning, and aligning human resource (HR) management systems to deal with new challenges.
When organizations are viewed as systems, the only way to adapt to volatile situations is through a strong interaction among its sub-systems. Consequently, these systems' primary performance indicators are their capacity to change together and the speed of adaptation. HR as a dynamic system should meet the requirements of such complex conditions. In this regard, HR and its sub-systems must design strategies and practices that respond to internal and external stakeholders' diverse and rapidly changing expectations.
The concerns that HR cannot effectively respond to the pace and dynamics of the complex environment are prevalent in the literature (Butterick & Charlwood, 2021; Camuffo & De Stefano, 2019; Harney & Collings, 2021; Kinnie & Swart, 2019; Snell & Morris, 2021). There is a general concern that a sole concentration on a “best practice” framework may endanger the theoretical validity and practical usefulness of strategic HR research (Jackson et al., 2014). Snell and Morris (2021) state that while businesses confronted global competition, diversification, comprehensive quality control, outsourcing, and strategic partnerships in the 1980s, the logic of a new system began to dominate organizations. As a result, it changed both the field of strategy and the ultimate mission of HR. The complexity surrounding organizations requires an analysis of the individual elements of the HR function, along with ways in which the pieces fit together into a more powerfully integrated system for managing people (Snell & Morris, 2021).
Furthermore, companies' strategic challenges reinforced HR to execute increasingly complex strategies, support variation in the organization, and continually recombine and integrate that variation (Morris et al., 2016). This reframing points to the issues of fit and alignment and calls for dynamic, multi-actor, and polyadic HR systems, which depicts HR as a more complex ecosystem comprised of many interacting components that include differentiated human capital capabilities, segmented cultures, multiple workforce compositions, and strategic complexity (Snell & Morris, 2021). This complexity can be interrogated through “the ecosystem perspective”, which has grown prevalent in theoretical and applied strategy discussions over the last decade. An ecosystem refers to a group of interacting yet semi-autonomous entities or actors that depend on each other's activities and therefore are somewhat hierarchically controlled (Jacobides et al., 2018, Meijerink & Keenan, 2019; Wareham et al., 2014). The ecosystem perspective reflects a growing interest in and concern about interdependencies across organizational systems' elements, structures, and actors.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Complexity: A scientific theory which asserts that some systems display behavioral phenomena that are completely inexplicable by any conventional analysis of the systems’ constituent parts.
Pandemic: an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affects a significant proportion of the population.
HR Ecosystem: A complex and dynamic framework of HR fit and alignment among its four subsystems; nameley strategy, workforce, capabilities, and culture.
COVID-19: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Systems Thinking: A holistic approach that focuses on the way a system's constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time, within the context of larger systems.
Future of Work: Describes changes in how work will get done over the next decade, influenced by technological, generational and social shifts.
Ecosystem: Refers to a group of interacting yet semi-autonomous entities or actors that depend on each other's activities and therefore are somewhat hierarchically controlled.