Expectations, effectiveness and discrepancies: exploring multiple HR roles in the Chinese business context

Abstract

One of the strategic issues in human resource management (HRM) research is the recognition of HR professionals' roles, yet how effective HR professionals are performing these roles has seldom been studied. This article conducts a two-phase study to explore the role expectations, role effectiveness and discrepancies of HR professionals in the Chinese business context. In the first phase, six roles in three domains were determined using a qualitative method. In the second phase, hypotheses were proposed and tested empirically. The results highlight that the value of role effectiveness is significantly lower than that of role expectation. In terms of perceptive discrepancies between HR and non-HR individuals, significant differences exist on the expectations of the roles in the strategic domain (i.e. facilitator and supporter), and also on the effectiveness of the roles in all three domains, except for that of facilitator in the strategic domain. The results also indicate that the effectiveness of each different role has a distinctive weighting in explaining the overall effectiveness of HRM, and that different groups hold diverse views on the relationship between role effectiveness and overall effectiveness.

Keywords::

• China
• discrepancy
• HR professionals
• role effectiveness
• role expectation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to two anonymous reviewers who have constructively commented on and provided suggestions for the development of the earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71302170], [grant number 71302119], [grant number 71121001], [grant number 71172178]; MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number 13YJC630036]; and Beijing Municipal Foundation for Talents Development [grant number 2013D005019000002].