Section Five INDIVIDUAL BEST PRACTICES VS. SYSTEMS
OF PRACTICES
As noted earlier in the discussion of individual best practices,
the Delaney and Huselid study, based on 590 for-profit and
nonprofit organizations from the National Organizations Survey,
used perceptual measures of organizational performance.
These measures were relative in the sense that survey
respondents reported on how the performance of their
organizations compared with others in the same industry. As
noted in the discussions of individual practices, the results
indicated that several such practices were significantly related
to performance. Nonetheless, tests of whether systems of
complementary practices provided greater performance found
the following result: “Our results do not support the assertion
that complementarities among HRM practices enhance firm
performance.”^100
The evidence on the superiority of the approaches is
mixed, with neither perspective clearly dominant in its
performance effects. For the individual best practices
perspective, there are some practices, such as selective
staffing, that have very strong effects. Such practices can be
expected to produce performance effects even in the absence
of a complementary system of supporting practices, such as