Section Fivepractices that help motivate and maintain a workforce.
Nonetheless, the adoption of single practices or a single “silver
bullet” practice is seldom a good means for increasing and
sustaining firm performance. The fact that high-performance
human resource practices tend to have high intercorrelations
provides good evidence that firms tend to maintain systems of
high-performance human resource practices. While they may
adopt such practices incrementally and begin with only one
such practice, over time the better-performing firms are likely
to develop supporting systems of high-performance practices.
Before the impact of systems can be determined, the
manner in which their components fit together within the
context of the firm must be better understood. Effective
systems are not likely to be collections of uncomplementary
practices. This point has been made as follows:
[I]t is difficult to grasp the precise mechanisms
by which the interplay of human resource
practices and policies generates value. To imitate
a complex system, it is necessary to understand
how the elements interact. Are the effects
additive or multiplicative, or do they involve
complex nonlinearities... researchers are a long
way from understanding the precise nature of
these interactions.^101