On the Interface Between Operations and Human Resources Management

Operations management (OM) and human resources management (HRM) historically have been very separate fields. In practice, operations managers and human resource managers interact primarily on administrative issues regarding payroll and other matters. In academia, the two subjects are studied by sepa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Manufacturing & service operations management 2003-07, Vol.5 (3), p.179-202
Main Authors: Boudreau, John, Hopp, Wallace, McClain, John O, Thomas, L. Joseph
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral Science
Bottlenecks
Cross-Training
Human resource management
Inventory
Low Inventory
Motivation
Multidisciplinary
Operations management
Operations research
Scheduling
Studies
Success
Turnover
Work Design
Worker Attitude
Worker Performance
Workers
Workforce
Workforce planning
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Summary:Operations management (OM) and human resources management (HRM) historically have been very separate fields. In practice, operations managers and human resource managers interact primarily on administrative issues regarding payroll and other matters. In academia, the two subjects are studied by separate communities of scholars publishing in disjoint sets of journals, drawing on mostly separate disciplinary foundations. Yet, operations and human resources are intimately related at a fundamental level. Operations are the context that often explains or moderates the effects of human resource activities such as pay, training, communications, and staffing. Human responses to OM systems often explain variations or anomalies that would otherwise be treated as randomness or error variance in traditional operations research models. In this paper, we probe the interface between operations and human resources by examining how human considerations affect classical OM results and how operational considerations affect classical HRM results. We then propose a unifying framework for identifying new research opportunities at the intersection of the two fields.
ISSN:1523-4614
1526-5498
DOI:10.1287/msom.5.3.179.16032