Development of a talent-based hybrid HR architecture for managing a non-standard global workforce

The fourth industrial revolution that utilises self-learning machines, robotics and automated decision making still relies on the human for cognitive work and shifting the burden of the menial job to digital devices. Organisations' requirements for adaptable and agile human talent in the fourth industrial revolution has already and will continue to necessitate a new way of working. This impact is already evident throughout the value chains of global organisations and will require new considerations for human resource management practice. The existing approaches to managing human resources (HR) continue to be challenged in delivering sustainable competitive advantage. One of the most prominent challenges faced by organisations operating at a global level is responding to an emerging trend of non-traditional and non-standard employment, for example, part-time, on-call, contract or agency mediated work. This trend gives organisations a unique opportunity to recruit employees worldwide using various platforms provided by information communication technologies directly aligned with the organisation's strategic intent. However, it appears that organisations may not be prepared and/or lack the strategic decision framework to manage a new type of employee. Although organisations are already using multiple HR systems to strategically align HR processes and practices, organisations need a different approach to recruit the best non-standard talent worldwide and manage them. Talent management is suggested in this thesis as being a new lens to develop a strategic decision framework to manage non-standard employees undertaken within three stages: i. identifying existing HR systems in use by multinational enterprises (MNEs); ii. exploring how talent management as a new approach can be used to rethink the existing HR systems for standard and non-standard employees; and iii. combining the proposed talent-based HR systems into an HR architecture as a decisional framework for managers to choose optimally among the various talent-based HR systems. This PhD research employed qualitative research methods consisting of 21 in-depth telephone interviews with key senior HR decision-makers from the maritime transport and logistics industry. The informants of this study were the strategic HR managers involved in future-oriented HR strategy development. The average length of the in-depth interviews was 50 minutes. A parallel analysis of data during data collection and the observation of saturation determined the cease point of data collection and suggested that 21 in-depth interviews were sufficient to explore the phenomenon. A saturation of information at four levels was observed to ensure the quality of research and to cover the aspects of talent-based HR systems identified by the managers. The informants provided information about the organisations' existing human resource management systems. The critical discussion was the views of informants on the development of contemporary HR systems and their potential components when considering the increase in the non-standard workforce. Interviews also included a detailed discussion on the understanding of what constitutes talent for the managers and how they consider the right talent can be employed to align with the strategic intent of the organisation. According to the findings of this study, organisations utilise a variety of HR systems that can be used for talent-based HR systems. Furthermore, HR managers have varying perspectives on talent and talent management, which can result in a variety of talent-based HR systems. The outcome of the discussion was the development of the value-driven framework and talent-based HR systems, which is the foundation of a talent-based HR architecture. The data analysed through the grounded theorisation process enabled the combination of the themes and revealed the industry experts' underlying decision models and talent perspectives. The thematic analysis underpinning the grounded theorisation process assisted in determining the patterns in data, and the interpretation of those themes resulted in the talent-based HR systems being grounded in the views of strategic HR decision-makers. This study contributes to the body of scholarship of strategic human resource management (SHRM) by offering a value-driven framework, a set of talent-based HR systems and an HR architectural framework. First, a value-driven framework is developed that indicates how value can be created, captured, leveraged and protected in each component of the HR system, such as designing jobs or the recruitment process. Second, this study offers talent-based HR systems aimed at developing a systematic and continuous process of managing highly talented employees and creating a talent mindset in the organisations. The value-driven framework is embedded in the proposed talent-based HR systems. Talent-based HR systems offer a systematic process of finding and utilising HR value for the strategic intent of the organisations by linking the value components such as value creation, capture, leverage and protection with the components of HR systems. Thirdly, this study develops a talent-based HR architectural framework that combines multiple talent-based HR systems and a value-driven framework in an HR architecture for organisations using multiple employment arrangements. Multiple employment arrangements include a combination of standard employees and non-standard employees such as part-time, on-call, causal, agency mediated, and platform mediated employees. Moreover, this proposed framework can be adopted by HR managers or to configure various types of standard and non-standard employees optimally. Furthermore, this proposed framework allows the managers to use a different lens to manage multiple types of employees, for example, different talent-based HR systems for multiple projects within the same organisation, without impacting the core HR system, such as commitment-based or productivity-based HR systems of the organisation. Future research areas could include expanding the value-driven framework, which currently assumes that people are the most valuable resource, to include other valuable resources, such as technology. The talent-based HR systems, founded on the value-driven framework and the resultant HR architectural decisional framework, could also be empirically tested for validation. Also, the talent-based HR decisional framework could be tested on a large sample to improve the statistical generalisability. Similar could be done on a large sample from various industries to ensure transferability of the decisional framework. Furthermore, the decisional framework can be customised for different organisations and industries. Moreover, as this study assumes people are a valuable source of competitive advantage, future studies can consider various sources of competitive advantage and combine them in a decisional framework in which the HR architecture decisional framework can be a part of the overall organisational competitive advantage architecture. This study contributes to the practice of SHRM and assists organisations in continuing business by offering an optimal combination of employment arrangements, termed the 'best-fit approach' in SHRM. It also provides a managerial decisional framework for sustainable competitive advantage where HR is considered an organisation's most valuable resource. This study can also reduce the post-COVID-19 economic impact and help organisations to cope with the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution.