AN ACE ANALYSIS – THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE COMPETITIVE DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN RESOURCE SYSTEMS AND THOSE OF ORGANIZATIONAL QUALITY PERFORMANCE

Abstract

The past decade has seen a notably active period in the long-running pursuit for quality in manufacturing. However, despite such heavy investments in quality assurance systems, product failures still surface. Hence, it is with this aim that our study investigated the relationships between the competitive dimensions of human resource systems and those of organizational quality performance.Primary data collected from 131 manufacturing plants from established manufacturing countries (Japan, U.S.A, Germany, Italy, Sweden – collectively “JUGIS”) across electronics, machinery industries, and automotive suppliers were studied. Through the application of the Alternating Conditional Expectations (“ACE”) algorithm on the aforementioned cluster, our study revealed several nonlinear and counterintuitive results. Specifically, all four dimensions exhibited either U-shaped transformations or inverted U-shaped transformations. Rigor of recruiting and selection process was found to exhibit the most statically significant relationship with organizational quality performance. Based on our results, we postulated several hypotheses that could explain the observations. The managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions stemming from our study were also discussed. We also applied our findings on emerging manufacturing countries as these countries begin to prioritize quality control and assurance in the pursuit of establishing trust and acceptance of its products in the global marketplace.