경쟁환경, 기술변화, 경쟁전략과 핵심인재관리 강도간의 관계에 대한 연구

Traditionally, large Korean companies have used standardized employment practices. Fresh college graduates have got almost identical compensation packages regardless of their major concentrations or competencies, if those graduates were hired by an employer. Employee competencies were rewarded by long-term promotion decision rather than by short-term pay increase. Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the globalization of large Korean firms caused changes in those practices. Large Korean companies began to treat top talents as special cases by providing special incentive, fringe benefits, specialized service to top talents. Some organizations heavily use diverse management tools that are specially designed for acquiring and maintaining top talents, while others do not. This paper investigates why we can observe the difference. This paper investigates the relationship between the critical influencing factors of firms and the use of top talents management tools based on the contingency approach, and highlights the effects of environmental dynamism, labor market, technological change, and competitive strategy in the use of human resource management tools for top talents. We hypothesize that firms facing rapidly changing market and changing technology are like to use a larger number of those tools. We also hypothesize that firms recruiting talents globally use a larger number of those tools than firms recruiting people domestically only. Additionally, we hypothesize that prospectors use a larger number of those tools than analyzers, and that analyzers use a larger number of those tools than defenders. To test the hypotheses, we analyzed data from 281 large Korean manufacturing firms. The data were collected by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training in 2005. Results from Tobit analysis support all hypotheses except the hypothesis on market changes. Firms facing fast technological changes, recruiting people globally, and pursuing strategies of prospectors utilize significantly larger number of management tools that are specially designed for acquiring and maintaining top talents. These results suggest that human resource management practices of organizations differ according to critical external environmental factors as well as competitive strategies of the organizations. This paper also reports how frequently large Korean firms use various management tools for acquiring and maintaining talents. Analysis of data from 454 large Korean firms shows that firms in banking and financial industries use those tools more intensively than those in manufacturing and non-financial service industries. The analysis also shows that Korean firms attempted to avoid severe deviation from traditional human resource management architecture in acquiring and maintaining top talents. After reporting the results, we discussed limitations of this paper and suggested directions of future research.