The Korean universities are getting pressure from both outside and inside to go through a reform. External threats include The education ministry’s urge to limit the total enrollments amid the decreasing school-age population in Korea, the governmen...
The Korean universities are getting pressure from both outside and inside to go through a reform. External threats include The education ministry’s urge to limit the total enrollments amid the decreasing school-age population in Korea, the government’s push for reforming academic structures at universities, and the cut-throat competition caused by emerging importance of international university rankings. Their weaknesses are static organizational culture, inefficient seniority-based HR management, and bureaucratic administrative culture. Thus, the Korean universities are called on to reform, but they have not much options due to the recent government-led tuition freeze and excessive regulations.
In order to overcome this difficult conditions and transform into a globally competitive university, the higher education institutions need to shift away from the traditional seniority-based HR management and start focusing on their staff’s organizational commitment, one of the critical indicators of organizational effectiveness. In this regard, this paper examined the influence of the university staff’s awareness of the performance-based HR management upon organizational commitment and the mediating effects of the staff’s perception of organization’s fairness, under the premise that the performance-based HR management can help the universities overcome their crises and become more competitive.
As the research method, this paper conducted a survey on regular administration staff members at a private university. To list the findings, first, it turned out that the performance-based HR management has a positive impact on the university staff’s commitment to the organization. More specifically, performance-based evaluation system and promotion system has a positive impact on staff commitment while such reward system did not appear to have any impact on staff’s commitment. Among the systems, evaluation showed an accountability stronger than that of promotion. Second, it was revealed that the performance-based HR management positively affects the university staff’s perception of organizational fairness as well as their perception of distributional fairness and procedural fairness, the sub-factors of organizational fairness. Among the performance-based HRM systems, evaluation appeared to have the strongest accountability, promotion the second strongest, and reward the third. The reward system turned out to have a little impact on the perception of fairness. Third, in the relationship between the performance-based management and organizational commitment, the staff perception of organizational fairness had a full mediating effect, and so do the sub-factors, distributional fairness and procedural fairness.
Based on the findings, this paper suggests the following:
First, when a university attempts to increase its staff’s organizational commitment by adopting performance-based HR management system proved in the business sector in and outside the country, it has to focus more on staff evaluation and promotion systems than on reward systems. Also, when introducing and implementing a performance-based reward system, a university needs to make sure the system is customized to reflect the organization’s characteristics since the schemes may have little impact on staff commitment as university staff’s performance is especially difficult to quantify.
Second, increase in the staff’s awareness of the university’s performance-based HR management leads to increase in their perception of organization fairness. In particular, the perception of procedural fairness are affected more strongly by the awareness of the new HR management than the perception of distributional fairness is. Therefore, when implementing a performance-based HR management at a university, perception of organizational fairness should be kept high to keep the staff’s organization commitment high. This will lead to high organization effectiveness and, ultimately to a better organizational performance.