The duality of practices and its organizational implications: Adoption of new HR practices and consequences on innovation in Korean firms following the 1997 Asian financial crisis

Organizations face normative pressures from institutional actors to adopt various practices. Much institutional research has offered insights about diffusion processes, decoupling, and adoptions’ implication for organizational legitimacy. However, this vast literature appears to have largely overlooked a parallel set of questions about whether and when institutionally prescribed practices deliver the intended outcomes. The questions are important given the dual nature of practices: They have both technical and institutional characteristics and serve as both tools and symbols. Such dual nature of practices has also been recognized to be accountable for unintended negative consequences of technically sound practices. Chapter 2 of my dissertation has two objectives. First, it provides needed empirical evidence about the intended consequences of institutional prescriptions in the context of Korean manufacturing firms. Following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, Korean firms faced normative pressure to adopt a comprehensive set of new market-oriented HR practices, where the practices were intended to facilitate innovation. Based on the positive effect of the prescription found in this context, I build more general theory about the conditions under which prescriptions deliver intended outcomes. The second objective of Chapter 2 is to develop and test theory about the types of practices more or less likely to deliver intended effects. Consistent with the theory’s predictions, the results show that the prescribed practices have divergent effects on innovation. Chapter 3, which is a qualitative add-on to Chapter 2, examines the practices’ organizational ramifications and innovation outcomes through a comparative case study of four major conglomerates in Korea. By doing so, the chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism behind the divergent effects of the prescribed HR practices.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Business Administration

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Seung Hoon

Contributors dc:contributor

• Love, E. Geoffrey
• Kraatz, Matthew S.
• Somaya, Deepak
• Schijven, Mario

• Organizations' Practice Adoption
• Institutional Theory

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Seung Hoon Lee

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105863

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/105863