Alternative balanced scorecards built from paradigm models in strategic HRM and employment/industrial relations and used to measure the state of employment relations and HR system performance across U.S. workplaces

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12271
• Author: Michael Barry,Rafael Gomez,Adrian Wilkinson,Bruce E. Kaufman
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Published date: 01 January 2021

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Alternative balanced scorecards built from

paradigm models in strategic HRM and

employment/industrial relations and used to

measure the state of employment relations and

HR system performance across U.S. workplaces

Bruce E. Kaufman

1,2

| Michael Barry

3

| Adrian Wilkinson

4,5

|

Rafael Gomez

6

1

Department of Economics, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia

2

Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

3

Department or Human Resources & Employment Relations, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

4

Centre for Work, Organization and Wellbeing, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

5

Department of Management, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

6

Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Correspondence

Bruce E. Kaufman, Department of Economics,

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303.

Email: baufman@gsu.edu

Funding information

Australian Research Council; Innovation

Resource Center for Human Resources

(formerly Industrial Relation Counselors Inc.);

Social Science Research Council of Canada

Abstract

This paper constructs alternative balanced scorecards based

on high-performance work system (HPWS) and employment

relations system (ERS) models. The models are depicted and

compared in diagrams and used as framework skeletons for

building separate HPWS and ERS scorecards, intended to pro-

vide a detailed data picture of the operational health and per-

formance of an organization's employment/HR system and its

operations, processes, and inputs/outputs. The scorecards are

filled in with nationally representative data from 2,000+

U.S. workplaces using more than 50 employment/HR indica-

tors, as reported by separate panels of managers and

employees. The indicators for each workplace are aggregated

into an overall HR/employment system score, ranked from

low-to-high, and graphed as frequency distributions. These dis-

tributions provide a unique snapshot picture of the mean and

dispersion of the state of employment relations and HR sys-

tem performance for companies across the United State. They

Received: 27 March 2018 Revised: 21 November 2019 Accepted: 24 November 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12271

Hum Resour Manag J. 2021;31:65–92. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 65

also reveal that “models matter”since the HPWS and ERS

scorecards provide distinctly different evaluation assessments.

KEYWORDS

balanced scorecard, employment relationship, high-performance

work system, industrial relations, strategic HRM

1|INTRODUCTION

The balanced scorecard (BSC) concept was introduced in 1992 by Kaplan and Norton (1992) and has become one of

the most widely discussed and adopted new management tools of the last 30 years (Cooper, Ezzamel, & Qu, 2017;

Sigalas, 2015). The scorecard is designed to provide company executives with real-time information on the internal

operation of the organization and progress toward attainment of strategic performance goals so they can early-on

identify problem areas and make adjustments (Nivens, 2007). A BSC is frequently analogized to the instrument panel

in an airplane's cockpit which gives pilots real-time information on the operation of the plane's systems and projec-

ted on-time arrival.

The BSC has received surprisingly small attention in the human resource management (HRM) field, with excep-

tion of two pioneering and frequently cited books The HR Scorecard by Becker, Huselid, and Ulrich (2001) and The

Workforce Scorecard (Huselid, Becker, & Beatty, 2005). These books take the generic BSC concept and rework it to

fit a company's HR function (first book) and nonsupervisory workforce (second book). Other than these two books,

Walker and MacDonald (2001) appear to be the only BSC study in an HRM field journal while several articles in non-

HR journals have applied the BSC to employees in public service organizations (Cunningham and Kempling, 2011)

and various HR practice areas, such as safety (Mearns & Håvold, 2003) and training (Baraldi & Cifalinò, 2015). Nei-

ther the two books nor journal articles, however, work out an operational version of a scorecard nor fill it in with

company data. Also, all of these studies examine the BSC solely as a tool for management practice and do not con-

sider its potential use as an analytical HR research measurement and evaluation device.

This paper makes contributions in each of these areas. First, after a 15-year hiatus since Huselid et al. (2005),

the paper picks up and further develops application of a BSC to HRM. Second, the paper goes the next step and

works out an empirical version of an HRM scorecard and fills it in with data collected from over 2,000 organizations

in the United States from a new nationally representative survey, State of Workplace Employment Relations Survey

(SWERS).

1

The scorecard results provide a unique snapshot estimate of the mean, variance, and low/high tails of the

distribution of American workplaces with respect to the quality of employment relations and workforce perfor-

mance. Third, the paper demonstrates research applications of the BSC tool, such as utilizing it to form a measure of

organizational workforce performance which can then be used as a dependent variable in statistical analyses.

Equal in significance is yet another area of contribution. As Kaplan and Norton (1992, 1996) and Huselid et al.

(2005) emphasize, the structural design of a BSC and set of data measures and performance indicators need to be

based on an underlying theoretical model. For example, the latter authors (p. 68) state, “without developing models

that show ‘what causes what’throughout the business—we’ll end up with a series of unrelated metrics.”Often

models appear to practitioners as academic playthings without real world consequence and researchers, though con-

vinced of the practical importance of theory and models, have difficulty pointing to examples where their models

yield tangibly-important and operationally relevant “so what?”implications. The BSC, however, provides a great

example of Kurt Lewin's aphorism “there is nothing so practical as a good theory”or, as framed in this paper, the

proposition “models matter.”The transparent reason is that different business/HR models lead to different scorecard

designs, different sets of input measures and indicators, and different outcome measures and organizational perfor-

mance evaluations.

66 KAUFMAN ET AL.