On the Interface Between Operations and Human Resources Management

TLDR

Operations management and human resources management have traditionally been separate disciplines that interact mainly on administrative matters, yet their activities are fundamentally intertwined, with operational contexts shaping HR outcomes and human responses to operations influencing traditional research models. The study probes how human considerations influence classical operations management results and how operational factors affect classical human resources management outcomes. The authors propose a unifying framework to identify new research opportunities at the intersection of operations and human resources.

Abstract

Operations management (OM) and human resources management (HRM) historically have been very separate fields. In practice, operations managers and human resource managers interact primarily on administrative issues regarding payroll and other matters. In academia, the two subjects are studied by separate communities of scholars publishing in disjoint sets of journals, drawing on mostly separate disciplinary foundations. Yet, operations and human resources are intimately related at a fundamental level. Operations are the context that often explains or moderates the effects of human resource activities such as pay, training, communications, and staffing. Human responses to OM systems often explain variations or anomalies that would otherwise be treated as randomness or error variance in traditional operations research models. In this paper, we probe the interface between operations and human resources by examining how human considerations affect classical OM results and how operational considerations affect classical HRM results. We then propose a unifying framework for identifying new research opportunities at the intersection of the two fields.