Human Resource Management in Higher Education - Cases Studies and Future Scenarios
CHAPTER TWO
The Role of the Human Resource Department: Comparative Analysis
Aleksandar Avramovic and Ying Zhang
Introduction
As Vasitha and Chauhan (2011) state “In every organization, there are three major resources to be managed if the organization wants to achieve its main objectives and goals. These resources are humans, materials and financial resources. And out of these three, human resource is the most important and difficult to manage” (p. 18). There are various proofs for this statement, but maybe the most important is connected to simple fact about human nature – every human being is different and tends to act differently in different or similar situations. Pellert (2007) noticed that “In people-intensive organizations like universities, human resource management commands a key role in the context of overall institutional development. Even though people are the most valuable asset of educational institutions – also in financial terms – and many universities have established procedures for the administration of personnel, they seldom have strategies or processes in place for “managing” their human resources” (p. 104). Reason for this may be in the fact that implementation of HR practices in universities is a recent phenomenon. It has evolved as personnel administration and in mid 1990s this function started to be named and treated as HR (Arslan, Akdemir & Karsli, 2013). Today, when universities tend to act as business like organizations – which include competition on the market for funds, excellent teachers and students – human resource management (HRM) is becoming more of a necessity. Managing staff in the proper way may not only help the organization to survive on the market, but also to improve its performance trough human resource development( Abella, 2004).
Much in the same way that every person is different, each higher education institution (HEI) has their own unique characteristics. Does this mean that HRM and the functions of HR departments are just as diverse? That question serves as the main topic of this study. Since there are a multitude of HEIs in the world we decided to narrow the scope to universities in Austria. Nevertheless some global trends in higher education HRM will also be examined and explained. First, we will try to define and explain the evolving discourses of HRM in recent decades, as well as HR departments' main functions. In the second part, our focus will be on explaining Austrian higher education system. This is important for the final part of the study where we analyze the results of the survey, which was distributed to Austrian HEIs in regard to principal functions of their HR departments. We will try to find out if there are any major divergences between these functions in different types of HEIs in Austria.
Changing Role of University HRM and Main Functions of University HR Departments
In the past, HR at universities was seen more as an administrative or personnel function in being assigned with tasks such as sourcing and paying people, providing benefits, and handling employee relations (Aon Hewitt, 2012). In fact, there were three main stages and paradigms in the development of higher education HR according to Arslan, Akdemir and Karsli (2013):
- Traditional Paradigm – this paradigm can be defined as the policies, practices and systems that influence employees' behavior, attitudes and performance. Traditional HR system functions in HEIs include compensation, training and development, performance management, recruitment, selection, and employee relations functions. Role of HR was to provide administrative and support functions by processing paper work, insuring that paychecks are cut accurately, and serving a general administrative role.
- Strategic Paradigm – defined as the pattern of planed human resource deployments and activities intended to enable organization to accomplish its goals. One of the main functions of HR was to translate organizational strategy into human resource priorities. HR performs a key role in achieving organizational vision and purpose and sustaining and maintaining competitive advantage, according to this paradigm. The transition from traditional to strategic HR was slow and sometimes not very successful.
- Value-Added HRM Paradigm – this is the most recent concept that combined the previous two paradigms. Rather than choosing one paradigm over the other, both paradigms are accommodated in the delivery of HR service. Traditional roles tended to be more functionally and technically related to HR while value-added roles were more strategic and business based. Main goals of value-added HR are providing skilled staff, enhancing organizational effectiveness, motivating performance, and designing and implementing effective processes. (p. 744-745).
Nowadays, when universities are getting more autonomy and also more responsibilities to manage their own staff, HR functions are transforming (Oakleigh Consulting Ltd., 2009). Therefore, focus of the universities is on devising suitable human resource management tools and facing numerous challenges such as development of an HR-strategy, choosing adequate career path models, implementing human resource and leadership skills development, promoting young researchers and professionalize administrative functions (Pellert, 2007).
According to Vasitha and Chauhan (2011) the main functions of university HR departments “can be listed into 3 main groups: personal utilization to meet organizational needs, motivation of employees to meet their needs and organizational needs in unison and maintenance of human relationships” (p. 18-19). These functions are usually part of the agenda of any HR department in university. Other functions which were used in the questionnaire are:
- Development of HR policies, guidelines, procedures, regulations and standards
- System communication to employees
- Labor administration
- Staffing
- Design and development of job classification systems
- Academic promotion, tenure and granting of continuous appointment
- Compensation
- Benefits – plan designs and administration
- Education, training and development
- Performance appraisals
- Dispute Resolution
- Non-renewal, layoff and terminations
- Payroll and managing work force information (HRMS)
(University of Minnesota, 2014)
Before going into details about the results of the survey, it is pertinent to describe the Austrian higher education system in Austria. We will see which types of HEIs exist in Austria and also look into the legal documents that regulate higher education HR.
The Austrian Higher Education System
Higher education in Austria consists of four types of tertiary institutions: 22 public universities, 12 private universities, 19 universities of applied sciences and 14 university colleges of teacher education (OeAD, 2014). Public universities are the most numerous and most important for the higher education system. They offer education in a wide variety of fields and, besides teaching and research in recent times, they started to cooperate with companies and other partners (Mohsin, Khan, Awan & Doger, 2011). Private universities are not that numerous and usually they have smaller numbers of staff and students compared to public universities. When it comes to universities of applied sciences, since the foundation of the first one in 1994/1995, there is a constantly growing demand in the higher education sector for this kind of higher education. The programmes on offer at present provide for an academically-based and practice-oriented education (OeAD, 2014). Finally, university colleges of teacher education offer a three-year (six-semester) Bachelor of Education (BEd) degree in combination with a teaching qualification for primary, secondary or special needs schools. Some of them also offer BEd degrees for polytechnic schools and for teaching religious education (OeAD, 2014).
Regarding legal documents regulating HEIs in Austria, the most important is the University Act from 2002 (Federal Gazette, 2002). Adopting this document was a major step towards a modern governance of universities, as well as implementing some new public management principles such as three-year global budgets and performance contracts (Mohsin et al., 2011). According to this act, universities in Austria became legal entities under public law, which means that they are to some extent independent institutions. The funding they receive is around 75% from the state and 25% from other sources (study fees, private funding). Another important document is the University Accreditation Act from 1999, which provides a legal basis for private universities, The Federal Act on the Organization of University Colleges of Teacher Education from 2005 and University of Applied Sciences Act from 1993 are also very important for the other two types of HEIs (European Commission, 2010). Regarding private universities funding, some of them also receive part of their revenue from the state while the others are fully financed by private sources. Universities of applied sciences and university colleges are quite similar as public universities, meaning that most of their funds come from the state (European Commission, 2010). Specifically, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy (2014) is responsible for higher education in Austria.
Regarding HR issues, the situation is different depending on the type of HEI. For example, there is a big difference in the number of staff members in public and private universities. According to UNIDATA (2015), the biggest public university in Austria in terms of staff is university of Vienna, with more than 9000 staff members and the biggest private university is Private Medical University Salzburg with around 500 staff. This difference in number of staff can affect the responses about HR department functions in the survey we conducted, but we will deal with this kind of issue in the next subsection. Also, when it comes to salaries in public universities, they are slightly higher than in private universities, and often private university staff are not too satisfied with their salaries. Regarding quality assurance, public universities have better and more developed internal quality assurance systems. Concerning gender issues each type of university is trying to have equality of men and women as much as possible. Finally, when it comes to recruitment of university staff, all institutions have to follow legal procedures, to be transparent and in accordance with international standards (Mohsin et al., 2011).
Now, when we are familiar with the system of higher education in Austria, we can proceed to the results of the survey and find out if there are some major differences between HEIs in Austria when it comes to functions of universities HR departments.
Survey of HR Department Functions in Austrian Universities
For the purpose of identifying the main roles and functions of HR departments in different types of Austrian HEIs, we created an online questionnaire – survey in the Survey Monkey programme, and distributed it to HR staff of these universities.
The survey is made of five questions related to HR department functions and its main goal is to find out the functions performed by HR departments in Austrian HEIs. In particular, asking them to identify the most important functions in their opinion and which of these functions are shared with other departments. In the first question we asked for the name of the university and the last question of this survey is whether these institutions have separate HR department webpage. In terms of the results, there are 67 universities in Austria in total and eventually, we received 20 responses from these universities (29.9%). These responses came from four different types of universities. Four responses were from public universities (out of 22 - 18.2%); two responses from private universities (out of 12 - 16.7%); eight responses from universities of applied sciences (out of 19 - 42.19%); two responses form university colleges of teacher education (out of 14 – 14.3%); and four of the respondents remained anonymous (they did not stated the name of the university). We can notice that a similar percentage of public, private and university colleges of teacher education responded while almost half of the universities of applied sciences responded.
The second question in the survey was whether HEIs in Austria have an HR department as part of their organizational structure. The survey showed that the majority of HEIs in Austria do have HR department (95.24%) - which suggests that this is a common feature of Austria colleges and universities.
The Functions of HR Departments
As mentioned above, we listed certain functions that are typically performed by university HR departments and tried to resolve which of these functions are performed by HR departments at Austrian HEIs. It is clear from the Figure 2 that most of these functions are performed in universities except the performance appraisals. Specifically, the four most important HR functions looking overall are creation of HR policies, staffing, job classification systems and education, training and development. However, a couple of institutions mentioned that there also are other functions within the HR department such as corporate health management and hospitality. These functions were not in the main list of HR functions in the survey, but HEIs added these by themselves.
Figure 1: Which of these functions are performed by human resource department at your university?
The Shared-Functions of HR Departments
After we identified which functions are performed by HR departments in Austrian HEIs, we were also interested in the interaction between HR department and the other departments in universities. Our third question was about shared functions between HR and some other departments and we found out that different type of HEIs in Austria have different shared responsibilities with other departments. If we look more into details of the questionnaire results, the survey showed that a few universities usually share more than one functions with the other departments, which means that HR department interacts far and wide within the institution. For instance, Vienna University of Economics and Business (a public university) was accounted to share about ten functions including staffing, academic promotion, outsourcing, benefits, and education development. Comparing this with the New Design University (a private university), staff only selected education development and terminations as two shared functions. However, the background and specific field related to higher education institutions should be taken into considerations.
The Most Important Functions of HR Departments
In terms of the university development, respondents were also invited to provide their opinions about the three most important functions of HR department for university development. Result showed that creation of human resources policies, system communication to employees and labor agreement negotiation and administration are the most important three HR functions for university development.
The HR department website
The last question were whether the HR departments have their individual web page on university website. The survey result showed that there are only 38.46% of universities that have a separate webpage for HR department. In most cases, HR staff contact details can be found in the services/administrative webpages instead of an individual HR webpage. This can mean that HR is still viewed as an administrative body, which is the traditional approach towards human resources.
Comparing Answers from Different type of HEIs
In this section we will look at individual groups of HEIs in Austria (public and private universities, universities of applied sciences and university colleges of teacher education) and try to find out if there are some similarities or differences between their HR department functions.
Public Universities
First, we will take a look into the answers of public universities. According to the survey all of the respondents have HR department in university structure. Out of 16 HR functions offered, public universities perform approximately 10 (62.50%). Among the functions that they do not perform are plan design and administration of benefits as well as strengthening the university-wide human resource community, etc. Again, most HR department functions are shared with some other university department (10 out of 16) and among them are staffing, dispute resolution, academic promotion, labor agreement negotiations and administration. The three most important HR department functions are creation of HR policies, communications to employees and job classification system. Finally, most of them have separate webpages on the university website.
Private Universities
According to the results of our survey, most of the private universities have HR department in their university structure. Compared to public universities, private universities' HR departments perform less functions (between three and eight). For example, UMIT – University of Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology perform eight functions (50%) and New Design University only 3 functions – system communication with the employees, labor agreement negotiations and job classification systems (around 18%). When it comes to shared functions, UMIT HR department shares all of its functions, and New Design University displayed two out of three. If we take a look at 3 most important functions of HR departments in private universities, they listed creation of HR policies, job classification system and HRMS. Two out of three most important HR functions are the same as in the case of public universities. Most of the private universities do not have a separate webpage for their HR department.
Universities of Applied Sciences (UoAS)
Most Austrian UoAS have an HR department in the university structure. Their HR departments also perform approximately 11 functions from the list, which is slightly more than public universities and significantly more than private universities. Among the functions they do not perform, the most common ones are outsourcing, performance appraisals and dispute resolutions. In addition to the functions we listed, the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences performs corporate health management as a separate function. When it comes to shared functions, creation of HR policies, system communication to employees and labor agreement negotiations are the most common shared functions. The most important HR department functions according to the survey are staffing, creation of HR policies and HRMS. This is pretty much similar to the responses of private universities (two out of three – HR policies and HRMS). Finally, there are some UoAS that do not have a separate webpage for their HR department.
University Colleges of Teacher Education (UCoTE)
In the final group we examined University Colleges of Teacher Education. According to the survey most of the UCoTE have HR departments. Among the HR department functions are usually most common HR functions such as staffing, education development, labor agreement negotiations and creation of HR policies. When it comes to shared functions, creation of HR polices, staffing, academic promotion and educational development are the most common ones. This is different comparing to three previous types of HEIs. Most important functions are on the other hand similar to previous groups, and these are HR policies, staffing and education development. In most of the cases these institutions have an individual webpage on the university website.
Conclusion
As we were able to see from the survey results, most of the HEIs in Austria have HR departments as part of their university structure. This means that HRM is becoming more important for universities' operations. When it comes to the result of the second question in the survey, we can see that different HEIs are using different sets of HR functions. Of course, some similarities exist, but in most cases the combination of the assigned HR functions were different. On the other hand, it is pretty much the rule that HR departments share responsibility for some HR functions with other university departments. When it comes to most important HR functions, most of the universities agreed that creation HR policies are most important. And finally, the majority of HEIs do not have a separate webpage for HR department on the university website.
We can conclude that there is some consistency about the most important HR department functions. Even though some universities have more staff than the others, having HR department as part of the university organization is a present trend in all types of HEIs, which indicates that HRM is essential. Finally, every university has shared responsibility for at least some of its HR department functions with other departments. On the other hand, there is not much consistency with assigned HR department functions within different types of HEIs in Austria. The most important thing is that universities are dealing with HR issues, even though in the most of the cases it is not visible on the universities websites.
Regarding to the survey design itself there is still work to be done in this field. Our inspiration for researching this topic was came from the study Human Resource Management: Comparative Study between Public and Private Universities in Austria conducted by Mohsin, Khan, Awan, and Doger (2011). This article is more about quality assurance practices of HR departments and it does not deal with specific HR functions in Austrian universities. However, they were using a survey in their study that showed very clear results. As such, our survey was designed with their model in mind as an attempt to fill the existing research gap they had not covered. Nonetheless, there is still room for improvement in our study. One problem was the number of responses from universities in Austria was insufficient at only around 30% of Austiran HEIs. In some cases this enough for drawing conclusions although the collection of more data is always superior. Another issue is the quality of the responses. Some of the respondents did not answer all the survey questions. Yet, we believe this is still a necessary and foundational start since there seemingly is no other studies at the moment that deal with this issue. This means that more efforts should be put in this field of study so that research gap can be filled properly with more than one study to compare with.
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