Strategy emergence in service delivery networks: Network‐oriented human resource management practices at German airports

• Date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Jörg Sydow,Markus Helfen,Carsten Wirth
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12298
• Published date: 01 November 2020

SPECIAL ISSUE

Strategy emergence in service delivery networks:

Network-oriented human resource management

practices at German airports

Jörg Sydow

1

| Carsten Wirth

2

| Markus Helfen

1

1

Department of Management, School of Business & Economics, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

2

University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

Correspondence

Jörg Sydow, Department of Management,

School of Business & Economics, Freie

Universität Berlin, Boltzmannstr. 20, D-14195

Berlin, Germany.

Email: joerg.sydow@fu-berlin.de

Carsten Wirth, University of Applied Sciences

Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany.

Email: carsten.wirth@h-da.de

Funding information

Hans Böckler Stiftung, Grant/Award Number:

2014-741-2

[Correction added on 06 November 2020,

after first online publication: The author

Carsten Wirth is included as a

co-corresponding author in this version]

Abstract

Organisational restructuring towards vertical disintegration

and the accompanying rise of service delivery network (SDN)

calls for closer attention, studying whether and how work and

employment are strategically managed across organisational

boundaries. In this paper, we adopt a “strategy-as-practice”

approach to explain the emergence of an Human Resource

Management (HRM) strategy which is geared towards manag-

ing work across organisational boundaries. Based on a compar-

ison of two German major hub airports, we find that

differences in network-oriented HRM strategising in areas

such as recruiting, remuneration and training result from

micro-political game playing. In this piecemeal process, man-

agement as well as external and internal stakeholders such as

workers' representatives, and local and federal politicians par-

ticipate by using their inter-organisational relationships and

institutionalised power resources to shape a network-oriented

HRM practice. With these findings, we contribute not only to

HRM research from a strategy-as-practice perspective that is

sensitive to institutions, butalsotoresearchoninter-

organisational collaboration that has neglected issues of HRM

so far, by and large.

Received: 31 May 2018 Revised: 7 April 2020 Accepted: 30 April 2020

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12298

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2020 The Authors. Human Resource Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

566 Hum Resour Manag J. 2020;30:566–585.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj

KEYWORDS

airport, employment relations, inter-organisational network,

network-oriented HRM, strategy-as-practice, structuration theory

1|INTRODUCTION

Inter-organisational coordination and collaboration in production and supply networks have become ubiquitous phe-

nomena, as many businesses have restructured value creation and appropriation through subcontracting and out-

sourcing. At the same time, such inter-organisational networks—also involving all sorts of independent service

providers and client firms—require new forms of managing work in order to reintegrate work activities carried out in

a process cutting across organisational boundaries. Nevertheless, human resource management (HRM) policies and

practices such as recruitment, remuneration and training, are predominantly thought of as being situated in a single

organisation rather than within a network of collaborating organisations (for exceptions, see Fisher, Graham,

Vachon, & Vereecke, 2010; Grimshaw, Willmott, & Rubery, 2005; Kinnie & Swart, 2020; Marchington, Cooke, &

Hebson, 2010;Marchington, Rubery, & Grimshaw, 2011; Swart & Kinnie, 2014).Ignoring the network dimension is

a serious conceptual void for HRM strategy research because it means the tensions between potential benefits and

obstacles through networks are neglected.

On the one hand, the attractiveness of sticking conceptually to the single-firm view resides in straightforward

modelling of the advantages of subcontracting such as risk-shifting and labour costs reduction (e.g., Lepak & Snell,

1999). On the other hand, embracing the network dimension conceptually may allow us to better understand the dif-

fusion of good HRM practices along the value chain (Scarbrough, 2000), opportunities for shared investments in

human capital development (Grimshaw et al., 2005, p. 47), or the need to align and integrate HRM consistently

across organisations (Marchington et al., 2011). The latter also includes closer control of operations across firms,

inasmuch as their frictionless functioning relies significantly on recurrent interactions and stable inter-firm relations.

Against this background, we engage with this strategic tension between short-term gains through market-like sub-

contracting and the opportunity to integrate the advantages of a longer-term, hybrid approach, by asking: Under

what conditions, whether at all, and if so, how do actors bring about a more collaborative approach to HRM across

organisations?

In order to answer this question, we use a strategy-as-practice perspective (cf, Vaara & Whittington, 2012) in

order to elaborate theory (Fisher & Aguinis, 2017), since it allows us to examine whether, by whom and how a

network-oriented HRM strategy emerges from practices in different HRM areas. According to a practice-based view,

actors' beliefs, norms and resource utilisation in action make a difference in strategy emergence. Such a view situates

strategy emergence within field-level institutions and their interplay with HRM practices (Björkman, Ehrnrooth,

Mäkelä, & A., & Sumelius, J., 2014;Vickers & Fox, 2010). Placing the inter-firm network at the focal level of analysis

allows us to understand how strategy formation emerges at this level and in multi-actor constellations in day-to-day

practice (e.g., Björkman et al., 2014). This contrasts with most of the current strategic HRM literature's preoccupa-

tion with various structural constraints influencing the appropriate strategic mix of HR policies in single firms

(e.g., Jackson, Schuler, & Jiang, 2014;Lepak & Snell, 1999; Tyson, 1997).

We draw on an empirical exploration of “Service Delivery Networks (SDN)”(Tax, McCoutcheon, & Wilkinson,

2013) at two large international hub airports in Germany over two decades (1996–2015), focussing on the more

recent years. Empirically we find in our most similar research design for these two airports that network-oriented

HRM practices result to differing degrees from micro-political game-playing and not from different competitive strat-

egies, leading—if at all—to the rather piecemeal introduction of a network-oriented HRM strategy. In this process,

management as well as external and internal stakeholders are involved by using their inter-organisational relation-

ships and institutionalised power resources to shape network-oriented HRM practices in HRM areas such as

SYDOW ET AL.567