HRM Practice Systems in Employer-of-Choice Health Care Organizations

In the past few years, organizations in a variety of industries have been urged to consider adopting human resource management (HRM) practices that can better capture the full of potential of their human capital (Pfeffer, 1994; 1998). Drawn by the promise for enhanced organizational performance, these HRM practices represent novel and progressive ways of deploying human resources. The rationale for their adoption is to improve employee and customer satisfaction, decrease operating expenses and lower costs, while sharpening organizational effectiveness and financial performance. Although not without controversy, there is a large and rapidly expanding body of evidence which shows a strong relationship between the adoption of certain HRM practices and higher levels of organizational performance (Becker and Gerhart, 1996; Boselie, Dietz and Boon, 2005; Bowen and Ostroff, 2004; Colbert, 2004; Delaney and Huselid, 1996; Guest, 1997; Huselid, 1995; Paauwe and Boselie, 2005; Wood, 1999).