노사관계와 인사부문의 역할은 정(+)의 관계인가? 부(-)의 관계인가? 패널분석을 통한 검증

With the continuing economic crisis and the deepening competitive environment, the roleof the HR department has been increasingly needed to shift from the traditional operational functionsto strategic one. Despite this need, the extent to which HR departments move to strategic roles isvery different for each company. The differences in the degree of HR’s strategic role have led manyresearchers to make efforts to identify which organizational and external factors affect the HR's strategicrole.This study noted Labor-Management(LM) Climate among the factors affecting the strategicrole of HR department. Based on the Power Dynamics and Resource Allocation Theory, this studyargued on the impact of LM climate on the HR’s strategic role. From a power dynamics point ofview, hostile labor-management climate can be predicted to serve as a situational factor that couldhighlight the importance of human resources to other departments within the organization, thus furtherstrengthening the strategic role of HR department. That is, the strategic role of HR department requiresa different form of resource distribution than before, so new agreements with other departments arenecessary. At this time a hostile labor-management climate could form a context in which the HRdepartment could be given strategic role. Conversely, it can be also predicted that hostile LM climate will weaken the performanceof the new strategic-oriented role by exhausting HR resources to existing operational-oriented roles.According to the resource allocation theory, the performance of a particular role inevitably involvesthe exhaustion of resources to perform other roles. Therefore, negative LM climate could lead HR department more focus on operational and functional roles, which actively prevent disputes and activelylisten to complaints of workers.To verify competing hypotheses about the impact of Labor-Management(LM) climate onthe strategic role of the HR Department, this study used the results of the Korea Labor Institute'sWorkplace Panel Survey(WPS) and to build a balanced panel and conduct a longitudinal analysison 110 corporates that responded at all times from the first to seventh.As a result of the empirical analysis, it was confirmed that is the more hostile the LMclimate within the company, the more strategic role the HR Department plays. These results suggestthat if the climate of LM is hostile, corporate strategic resources are concentrated on the HR Departmentto remove uncertainties within the company. In addition, this study is meaningful that is consistent with the prior cross-sectional studiesthrough the panel analysis, a more rigorous causal analysis. It is commonly suggested that the strategicresources of the company are concentrated on HR department and the strategic importance and roleof HR is increased in order to eliminate uncertainties within the company. In particular, as hostileLM Climate has been pointed out as a major factor in weakening corporate competitiveness in Korea,this study could provide important implications. Through the results of this study, we emphasizedthe role of LM climate on strategic role of HR department, and the limitations of the research andthe direction of further research were discussed.