Section SixBenchmarking
In addition to these approaches, criteria, and measurements,
another general evaluation approach has been applied to
human resource practices in recent years. This approach is
called benchmarking.^22 The origination of benchmarking in the
United States is generally credited to Xerox, which used the
approach to reduce its manufacturing costs. In essence,
benchmarking involves studying how competitors, and
sometimes even companies in unrelated industries, are better
at certain activities. For example, Ford studied 400 different
features of the automobiles of competing manufacturers, with
the goal of designing and producing a car that would be better
than, or at least as good as, the best competitor in each
feature.^23
Similarly, benchmarking in human resource applications
involves the collection of information about specific human
resource practices, from large numbers of respondents across
many companies. At a macro-analysis level, Ulrich, Brockbank,
and Yeung at the University of Michigan collected information
on 21 human resource practices in the general areas of
staffing, development, performance appraisal, rewards,
communication, and organizational design. Questionnaires
composed of five-interval response scale items (where 1 = low
and 5 = high) were used to measure these practices. The