Jeff Ericksen

Right from the Start: Exploring the Effects of Early Team Events on Subsequent Project Team Development and Performance

This study examines if high- and low-performing project teams differ with respect to how they are mobilized and launched and the effects of their mobilization and launch activities and outputs on subsequent team progress and performance. Comparisons of three high- and three low-performing teams drawn from five major corporations showed that the high performers mobilized relatively quickly, used comprehensive rather than limited mobilization strategies, and conducted participatory rather than programmed launch meetings. This combination of activities produced a constellation of salutary outputs: more time for the teams to do their work, team members with essential task-related competencies and sufficient time to contribute to their projects, and complete rather than partial performance strategies. In turn, the three salutary outputs formed a constellation of key inner resources that propelled the high-performing teams on a virtuous path of reinforcing activities and outputs that, despite difficulties, ultimately led to success, whereas the absence of one or more of these resources led the low-performing teams down a vacuous path of accumulating confusion and inactivity from which they never recovered.

Toward a strategic human resource management model of high reliability organization performance

In this article, we extend strategic human resource management (SHRM) thinking to theory and research on high reliability organizations (HROs) using a behavioural approach. After considering the viability of reliability as an organizational performance indicator, we identify a set of eight reliability-oriented employee behaviours (ROEBs) likely to foster organizational reliability and suggest that they are especially valuable to reliability-seeking organizations that operate under ‘trying conditions’. We then develop a reliability-enhancing human resource strategy (REHRS) likely to facilitate the manifestation of these ROEBs. We conclude that the behavioural approach offers SHRM scholars an opportunity to explain how people contribute to specific organizational goals in specific contexts and, in turn, to identify human resource strategies that extend the general high performance human resource strategy (HPHRS) in new and important ways.

Crafting a human resource strategy to Foster organizational agility: a case study

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