Article Analysis Essay: The Impact of Human Resource Practices on Employee Retention in the Telecom Sector

Introduction

Salaried employee retention doctrine is an intricate subject especially regarding the factors influencing it. The concept becomes even more critical to the human resource managers who are mandated with the responsibility of acquiring and retaining the best talents available for sustainable growth of an organisation. This article review focuses on the impact of human resources management practices on employee retention in the telecom field. In the article, Haider et al. (2015), a team of researchers from various universities, have specifically identified three human resource practices, that is, organizational culture, compensation, and training and development and developed a questionnaire to measure their correlation with employee retention. From their study findings that involved 250 participants, the research has confirmed their three hypothesis. To evaluate the importance of the article as a contribution to the body of knowledge regarding employee retention, this review will critically analyse the article from methodological, presentational and their argument perspective.

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Basically, this article is derived from previous studies that have suggested that effective HR practices can indeed bring down the employee turnover rates. Precisely, the authors adopt HR practices identified by Khan et al. (2014) with a potential to improve job satisfaction and consequently improve retention levels in an organisation. Essentially, the study exhibits an excellent property of progressive research which is recommended as a way of building scientific knowledge through an address to research gaps in the particular field of study. However, while the identified practices are undeniably valid for the telecom sector, this study omits to mention that the previous research was based on a university-employee setting. The basic fact that the effectiveness of HR practices may vary depending with sector attributes makes it a critical omission that should have been addressed.

While the authors have missed mentioning the difference in study setting they were building their research on, the variables subjected to correlation measurement are absolutely relevant for this particular research. Being a correlational study in nature and employing regression analysis to measure the relationship between these practices and retention, the first step is to ensure that there is collinearity and this has well been ensured by running collinearity diagnosis. In other words, the HR practices adopted are independent and accurate to be used in a linear regression. This check further demystifies the credibility of their findings.

From the study findings, as predicted, the authors observe a high correlation between employee retention and the three HR practices that, is organizational culture, training and development, and compensation. These findings confirm the parent study's assertion that better HR practices can increase employee retention. However, the result reveals a rather unexpected trend. According to the authors, the research shows that training and development, a core HR practice, has a 30.2 % negative impact on employee retention. This specific statistic leaves the study's first hypothesis which predicted a positive relation between training and development and employee retention rejected. For the other two practices, the findings show a significant positive impact on employee retention with organization culture and compensation scoring 58.8% and 32% respectively.

These findings are very critical and the subject of discussion. According to the authors, despite showing a negative impact on employee retention, training and development programs develop employee's skillset which ultimately reduces turnover and increase employee retention. They even go further to support their standpoint with a study by Birmingham et al. (1996) that reveals that the main cause of high turnover in the organisation is due to inadequate training at the entry level. To explain for the divergent negative impact of training programs on retention, the article argues that this phenomenon could have been caused by lack of appropriate compensation structure in the organisation. This argument is completely valid because when you train a person and fail to compensate them accordingly, they are likely to go for opportunities in other firms which can compensate them better.

For the compensation and organizational culture practice, while the authors of the article recognize their high strength in predicting the employee retention, the cause for the significant difference in the degree of impact has not been explained. It is obvious, from the results that organizational culture (58.8%) causes the largest positive impact compared to compensation (32%) and there should be an explanation to this. Is this variation dependent on sectors? Or is it the same in all sectors? Or is it organisation specific? These are some of the questions the reader might ask but the article has no answer to. However, these are interesting findings which open up to more studies to address the gaps identified and build on to the knowledge on the subject of employee retention.

Conclusion

From the above analysis, it is certain that the authors were thorough in executing all the required research design steps. The review can, therefore, affirm that the results produced by the study are indeed credible and valid for making a generic conclusion on the employee retention. The post-results discussion is also well supported by literature and this further improves the understanding of the relation between HR practices and rates of turnover. However, it would be enlightening if the study was able to address the shortcoming mentioned above.

Reference

Haider, M., Rasli, A., Akhtar, C. S., Yusoff, R. B. M., Malik, O. M., Aamir, A., ... & Tariq, F. (2015). The impact of human resource practices on employee retention in the telecom sector. International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, 5(1S), 63-69.

Link to the article

http://econjournals.com/index.php/ijefi/article/viewFile/1344/pdf