Analytical abilities and the performance of HR professionals

• Author: Grant Russell,David Kryscynski,Ryan Stice‐Lusvardi,Cody Reeves,Michael Ulrich
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21854
• Published date: 01 May 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Analytical abilities and the performance of HR professionals

David Kryscynski

1

| Cody Reeves

1

| Ryan Stice-Lusvardi

2

| Michael Ulrich

3

|

Grant Russell

4

1

Marriott School of Management, Brigham

Young University, Provo, Utah

2

School of Management Science and

Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford,

California

3

Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah

State University, Logan, Utah

4

Google, Mountain View, California

Correspondence

David Kryscynski, Associate Professor of

Strategy, Management Department, Marriott

School of Business, Brigham Young University,

567 TNRB, Provo, UT 84606.

Email: dk@byu.edu

Recent years have shown an increased focus on workforce analytics and the importance of

workforce analytics in helping HR professionals to be more useful business partners. This sug-

gests that HR professionals may need to become more and more data savvy and develop bet-

ter analytical abilities if they hope to perform well and contribute meaningfully in the future.

Despite this emphasis, there has been no research explicitly connecting the individual level ana-

lytical abilities of HR professionals to their job performance. Using a proprietary sample of

360 feedback surveys from 1,117 HR professionals in 449 unique organizations we test this

general relationship. We also test whether the relationship varies by industry-, company-, and

job-level factors. We find support for our main hypotheses that HR professionals with higher

analytical abilities will also have higher perceived job performance. We also find that the

strength of this relationship varies by some job roles. We explore and discuss these empirical

results.

KEYWORDS

ability, HR and technology, strategic HR

1|INTRODUCTION

The role of HR professionals has evolved throughout history—from

“personnel administrators”and “industrial relations professionals" in

the 20th century to “HR managers”and “people managers”in the

21st century (Ferris et al., 2007; Kaufman, 2014, 2015). However,

HR professionals still struggle to get out from under their own his-

tory. The work of HR professionals continues to be perceived as

administrative (Lawler & Mohrman, 2003) in spite of a steady

decrease in the time spent on administrative tasks, as well as

increased involvement in executing and developing organizational

strategy (Lawler, 2005; Ulrich, Younger, & Brockbank, 2008). For

more than two decades, numerous scholars and practitioners have

demonstrated the importance of a strategic role for HR (Lawler,

2005; Ulrich et al., 2008) and further urged HR professionals to focus

on activities that place them in full strategic partnership with other

key decision makers within the business (Brockbank, 1999; Lawler &

Mohrman, 2000; Ulrich, 1997; Ulrich, Brockbank, & Johnson, 2009;

Ulrich, Younger, Brockbank, & Ulrich, 2012), but the profession as a

whole still struggles to establish itself as a strategic partner (Ferris

et al., 2007; Hammonds, 2005; Mundy, 2012). There are a number of

factors that may contribute to this struggle, but one prominent factor

is HR’s lack of evidence-based rigor in decision making. Workforce

analytics has been popularly identified as one means by which HR

can address this failing and enhance its empirical rigor, but HR may

not have the necessary capabilities (Boudreau & Ramstad, 2007;

Meinhert, 2011; Oehler, 2015; Roberts, 2009; Schramm, 2006; Zie-

linski, 2014a). With a growing consensus that the HR profession

needs greater analytical rigor, we might presume that HR profes-

sionals with greater analytical abilities will be better HR professionals

overall, ceteris paribus. They may make better decisions, have greater

influence, generate new insights, better communicate with business

leaders, and so forth.

Despite a growing sentiment that HR professionals with higher

analytical skill will be a better strategic resource and partner (Robb,

2003; Roberts, 2009; Zielinski, 2014b), we find no empirical evidence

supporting this general supposition at the individual level. We find

many claims that analytical skill may be critical for HR professionals

(e.g., Lawler, 2006; Roberts, 2007) and that increasing the analytical

skill of HR professionals holds “the potential for HR managers to

communicate HR’s value and further transform its image from a back

office administrative oriented function to a full-fledged strategic and

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21854

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business partner”(Dulebohn & Johnson, 2013). Unfortunately, how-

ever, these claims are primarily theoretical and/or based on anecdotal

observation. We also find evidence supporting a general positive cor-

relation between HR analytics and different dimensions of perfor-

mance at the HR department level (Lawler & Boudreau, 2015), but

we simply lack empirical evidence supporting the relationship

between an individual HR professional’s analytical abilities and that

person’s performance.

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to explicitly test whether

HR professionals who have better analytical skills also demonstrate

higher performance, as well as the contextual factors that may mod-

erate that relationship. Based on the research mentioned above, we

generally expect that higher analytical skills will relate to higher indi-

vidual performance. We also draw upon extant organizational

research to argue that the positive relationship between analytical

skills and individual performance will be stronger in certain industry,

company, and job contexts. Specifically, we expect this relationship

to be stronger in: (a) high-tech industries, (b) companies whose HR

departments engage in high levels of HR analytics, (c) lower job

levels, and (d) HR generalist job types.

We test our hypotheses using a unique and proprietary data set

from the Human Resource Competency Study (Ulrich, Brockbank,

Johnson, & Younger, 2007; Ulrich, Brockbank, Johnson, & Younger,

2010). This practitioner-oriented study recruited more than 4,000 HR

professionals in 2015 to participate in a 360 feedback process where

raters evaluated both the HR professionals’individual competencies

as well as their performance. We leverage measures of the HR pro-

fessional’s perceived analytical skill along with measures of that HR

professional’s perceived performance for 1,117 of the HR profes-

sionals in the sample. The results support our main hypotheses, but

of our hypothesized interactions we only find partial support for our

expectation that analytical abilities will be more valuable for HR gen-

eralists than HR specialists. We thus contribute to the emerging

stream of academic research in workforce analytics in at least two

ways. First, we provide a large-scale empirical test of the taken-for-

granted assumption that HR professionals with higher analytical abil-

ities will also have higher individual performance. Second, we explore

the conditions under which analytical skill may have stronger or

weaker relationships with individual performance.

2|THEIMPORTANCEOFANALYTICAL

ABILITY IN HR

In the past decade, reports of HR analytics’successes have spurred

discussions from both practitioners and scholars about the impor-

tance of utilizing workforce data and analytics to strengthen HR’s

contribution to organizations. Schramm (2006) reported that effective

use of workforce analytics was a key determinant of successful

human capital management. Since that time, a number of scholars

and consultants have championed workforce analytics

(e.g., Boudreau & Ramstad, 2007; Gibbons & Woock, 2007; Ulrich &

Dulebohn, 2015) and identified it as a key area for investment

(Mondore, Douthitt, & Carson, 2011; Ulrich & Dulebohn, 2015). The

result is that more and more HR professionals are using HR data to

provide legitimate and reliable foundations for decisions (Boudreau &

Ramstad, 2007).

Although many executives recognize the potential of HR to pro-

vide insights about human capital and shape the organization in mean-

ingful ways (Lawler, 2006; Zeidner, 2009), it is not entirely clear

whether HR professionals have the analytical skills and abilities to

realize this potential. Scholars argue that successful HR analysts

require substantial analytical skills (Levenson, 2005; Wolfe, Wright, &

Smart, 2006), and, historically, HR has not attracted individuals with

strong analytical and quantitative skills (Roberts, 2009; Ulrich & Dule-

bohn, 2015), which has led to a dearth of qualified analysts in HR

departments. Brockner and Flynn (2006) observed that “future HR

practitioners almost universally shy away from the more analytical

classes.”Given this reluctance toward analytics typical of most HR

professionals, it is not surprising that the decisions made about human

capital often lack evidence-based rigor. The stigma of HR as being low

on decision-making rigor and subsequently credibility has led many to

push for the adoption of evidence-based methods that validate HR

decisions and place it on equal footing with its other partners in busi-

ness (Lawler, 2006). Many have come to view workforce analytics as a

major means in achieving this goal. It makes use of “data, metrics, sta-

tistics and scientific methods, with the help of technology, to gauge

the impact of [human capital management] practices on business

goals”(Roberts, 2009). In using analytics, HR professionals are better

able to provide managers and executives with insights and recommen-

dations that are based on empirical evidence.

Many have expressed impatience with the often less-than-

empirical approach many HR professionals employ. Pfeffer and Sut-

ton (2006) capture the exasperation of many who have dealt with HR

professionals who have sought to employ logic and conventional wis-

dom in place of evidence-based claims: “Evidence-based management

is based on the belief that facing the hard facts about what works

and what doesn’t, understanding the dangerous half-truths that con-

stitute so much conventional wisdom about management, and reject-

ing the total nonsense that too often passes for sound advice will

help organizations perform better.”In light of such sentiments, we

would expect to find that an individual who utilizes analytical skills

and abilities would be a welcome contrast to other less empirically

grounded HR professionals, and approval for this evidence-based

approach would be reflected in the individual’s performance ratings.

Scholarly empirical investigation is needed to examine the expecta-

tion that an HR professional’s analytical skills and abilities positively

impacts individual performance.

We conceptualize an individual’s analytical ability following the

LAMP framework introduced by Boudreau and Ramstad (2007). They

introduce the LAMP framework to articulate how HR can move to

leverage rigorous principles of decision science in engaging workforce

management. LAMP stands for (a) logic—ensuring a clear causal logic

connecting measures and relevant business outcomes, (b) analytics—

engaging analysis that clearly tests relationships between measures

and outcomes, (c) measures—identifying the right data and ensuring

high-quality data, and (d) process—ensuring a process for incorporat-

ing the insights from rigorous analytics into business decision making.

While their framework focuses on how the HR function can

more fully engage HR analytics, these four components are clearly

716 KRYSCYNSKI ET AL.