Section Fiveindividual practices. Thus, we shall examine the effects of
systems of practices.
Recently, sophisticated empirical studies have provided
definitive answers to persistent questions about the bottom-line
performance effects of systems of human resource practices.
While the literature has long asserted that certain practices will
produce higher performance, until recently there was only
scattered evidence for individual practices and virtually no
evidence on systems of practices. While there is now evidence
on the performance effects of such systems, the particular
practices to be included in the various systems are often a
function of the research methodology. Many of the studies
examining systems of human resource practices have employed
statically derived groupings of practices. By using statistical
procedures such as factor analysis, they usually identify groups
or clusters of individual practices and then label each cluster as
a system. Although the systems consist of empirically related
practices, there may be less logical consistency than would
occur if a human resource executive were asked to develop
such systems. A summary of the performance impact of
systems of human resource practices is presented in Table 5-2.