HR practices or HR systems?
An organisation‟s „HRM‟ can be viewed as a collection of multiple, discrete practices with no explicit or
discernible link between them, or the more strategically-minded system approach views HRM as an
integrated and coherent „bundle‟ of mutually reinforcing practices. Research using the former approach
tends to generate an index of possible HR practices, and investigates how many are used by the sample,
while the „systems‟ approach has researchers constructing „clusters‟ of inter-related HR activities, and
linking this group as a synergistic whole to performance. We used the five methods described by Guest
and colleagues (2004) to identify a systems approach, namely a straightforward measure of reliability
(e.g. Cronbach‟s alpha), factor analysis (e.g. principal component analysis, or confirmatory analysis),
cluster analysis, regression analysis with interaction variables, and sequential tree analysis.