Electronic human resource management and organizational innovation: the roles of information technology and virtual organizational structure

Abstract

In the information age, firms increasingly incorporate information technologies (ITs) into human resource management (HRM) to cope with technological challenges. HR managers can achieve their goals with the analyzed information produced by IT. Besides, with the help of the evolving IT, HRM has entered into electronic-HRM (e-HRM) era with features of self-service and intranet based. Since e-HRM is gaining more attention nowadays, it is necessary to introduce e-HRM in the working organizations. From business theory and practice, this study demonstrated that e-HRM has two critical cornerstones: IT adoption and virtual organization (VO) adoption. On the basis of hierarchical regression analyses from 86 information and electronics companies in Taiwan, this study demonstrated that IT and VO adoptions positively affect organizational innovation. Furthermore, IT and VO adoptions also positively moderate the relationship between employees' creativity and organizational innovation. As mechanisms to strengthen creativity-innovation transformation processes in organizations, IT and VO thus become crucial core competences that build and maintain organizational competitive advantages. Coping with the changing environment and keen competition, HR managers should keep themselves informed regarding the latest developments in IT and VO to create winning companies.

Keywords:

• creativity
• electronic human resource management
• information technology
• innovation
• virtual organization

Acknowledgment

The author thanks the National Science Council in Taiwan, Republic of China, for financially supporting this research under Contract No. NSC 96-2416-H-151-006-SS2.