Research by: Dynah A. Basuil and Andrea Santiago
Executive Summary
As Philippine companies increase their pool of higher skilled workers, the management of human resources (HR) as a function needs to evolve to better leverage on the companies’ human-based capital towards a sustained competitive advantage that can lead to overall superior performance.
We conducted a study in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Center for Effective Organizations and leading Philippine online recruiting solutions provider Jobstreet. In this study, we observed the evolution of the time spent on HR function among companies in the Philippines and compared the big Philippine companies with other big companies globally. While HR among Philippine companies are beginning to spend more time on tasks of strategic nature and less on those of administrative nature, compared to the global trend, HR among the big Philippine companies are still behind in their uptake of strategic partnering initiatives.
In this article, we also provided evidence on how the HR function (in terms of the strategic mission, activities undertaken, and role in business strategy) can drive performance of Philippine companies and suggested future directions in the ongoing evolution of the HR function on a journey to better company performance.
Our results showed that an HR strategy revolving around the provision of business partner services and strategic partner services was strongly associated with better company performance. No relationship was found between an HR strategy involving the provision of basic administrative services and superior company performance. Higher company performance was also observed for those undertaking value adding HR activities, i.e., developing HR systems and practices and strategic business partnering. When the HR function is fully integrated with the business strategy, companies were found to perform better. Findings from this study consistently support the value of HR, when seamlessly interconnected with core businesses in terms of strategy and activities, in generating better performance outcomes for the company, at least in the Philippine setting.
To cite this article: Basuil, D. A., & Santiago, A. (2020). On the right track?: Human capital management in the Philippines. International Journal of Employment Studies, 28(2), 6–29. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.624428151431250
To access this article: https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.624428151431250
About the journal
International Journal of Employment Studies is a fully refereed journal published by the International Employment Relations Association (IERA) on behalf of the OWL-Net research consortium.
[ABS1] International Journal of Employment Studies
