Orienting Human Resource Management to Serve University Commercialisation
The contribution of human resource management (HRM) to organisational performance is confirmed, yet there remains the challenge to understand how the configuration of HR practices leads to organisational outcomes. The objective of this research is to examine university commercialisation strategies and the HRM configurations that serve these strategies. Adopting the resource-based view and the notion of HR architecture, this thesis investigates how university commercialisation organisations (UCOs) create and shape a climate for commercialisation through human resource policies and practices, and how the employees perceive and appraise such climate. This qualitative study examined three UCOs in New Zealand and Australia and undertook 85 semi-structured interviews with UCO staff members at the executive level (strategic), middle management level (implementation) and employee level. The findings identified three different UCO strategic models: “service-provider”, “relationship-builder” and “money-maker”. Corresponding to these different strategic models, each UCO has a different climate that it wants to achieve through its HRM, which subsequently translates into different configurations of HR policies and practices. Nevertheless, despite these discernible differences, a generic HRM model still tends to dominate across the three UCOs due to industry-specific needs and challenges. This research also identified resource availability and organisational history and stability as factors that affect UCOs’ HR strategy and implementation, which in turn determine employees’ perception of HRM. Taken together, this research contributes to the field of HRM by empirically testing and providing insight into the association between organisational strategy, HR program configurations and employee appraisal. The identification of different university commercialisation strategies, factors that influence the effectiveness of UCO strategy and HR practices that can enhance employee perceptions also has practical implications for future university research commercialisation activities.
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