제도의 채택과 디커플링(Decoupling) 정도에 영향을 미치는 조직의 특성 : 기업의 경력개발제도 사례 (The Effect of Organizational Traits on the Adoption and Decoupling of an Institution: The Case of Career Development Programs in South Korea)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국인사조직학회
· 수록지 정보 : 인사조직연구 / 19권 / 2호 / 253 ~ 297페이지
· 저자명 : 조선미, 강정한

초록

본 연구는 제도의 채택과 채택된 제도의 디커플링(decoupling) 정도, 즉 도입과 실행사이의 괴리를 줄이는데 영향을 미치는 요인으로 조직 내부와 외부로부터의 규범적 압력에 주목했다. 신제도주의적 동형화의 관점은 조직 외부로부터 규범적 압력에 초점을 맞추어 조직이 정당성(legitimacy)을 유지하기 위해 제도를 채택한다고 설명한다. 그러나 채택된 제도의 디커플링에 영향을 끼치는 요인에 대해서는 상당부분 이론적 공백으로 남아있다. 본 연구는 이를 설명하는 하나의 메커니즘으로써 제도주의적 관점을 조직 내부의 동학으로 연결하는데 주목하였다. 즉, 정당성을 유지하기 위한 조직의 노력으로 외부로부터의 압력뿐 아니라 조직 내부의 주요 이해관계자로부터 발생하는 규범적 압력에 반응하여 채택된 제도의 디커플링이 줄어들 가능성이 있다. 경험적 분석을 위해 경력개발제도(career development program)를 사례로 조직에 가해지는 다양한 규범적 압력을 가능하게 하는 경로들이 제도의 도입과 디커플링에 주는 효과를 탐색하였다. 조직의 의사결정권자로는 경영진을, 경력개발제도에 관련된 주요 이해관계자들로는 인사부서와 일반 노동자를 선별하였고 데이터는 한국노동연구원에서 시행한 2005 사업체패널조사를 사용하였다. 분석 결과, 조직의 외부환경으로부터 발생한 압력뿐만 아니라 조직내부에서 인사부서, 노동자로부터 발생하는 경력개발제도의 필요성에 대한 압력은 모두 경력개발제도의 도입을 촉진시켰다. 한편 도입된 제도의 디커플링 정도를 낮추는 데에는 이러한 이해관계자로부터 압력의 효과가 제한적으로 나타남을 발견했다. 경영진과 노동자 사이에서 의사소통을 원활하게 해주는 제도나 기술적 인프라가 잘 발달해 있을 경우 경력개발제도의 디커플링이 줄어든 반면, 경영진과 노동자의 공동협의정도, 경영진과 인사부서간의 전략적 통합정도는 디커플링에 영향을 미치지 않았다. 따라서 의사결정과정을 통한 직접적인 영향력의 행사보다는 소통을 통한 규범적 합의가 디커플링을 줄이는데 더 효과적인 것으로 판단되었다. 이는 조직 내부에서도 제도주의적 메커니즘이 제도화를 촉진시키는데 기여하는 것으로 해석할 수 있다.

영어초록

Career development programs (CDPs) have been adopted by many firms in Korea during the turbulent liberalization and globalization transition period. In labor-flexible environments,CDPs can help companies to keep competitive manpower by promoting the importance of firm-specific human resources (HR). CDPs can be used as means to enhance general skills and help employees to stay competitive in an unstable job market. In short, managers and employees have different or even a conflicting interests in implementing CDPs. The decoupling between adoption and the real practice of CDPs has interesting implications for neo-institutional organization research. Thus, this study examines possible determinants of the decoupling issue in adoption of CDPs.
Research streams in neo-institutionalism have sought diffusion mechanisms of a new institution. They consider ‘decoupling’ as the main coping strategy to protect the organizational core from newly adopted institutions while paying relatively little attention to variations of decoupling across organizations. This study examines what organizational factors aid successful implementation of, or reduce the decoupling of, CDPs. To achieve this goal, we first divide the processes of organizational institutionalization into two stages. The first stage is adopting an institution from outside as a result of interactions between an organization and external legitimacy pressure. Organizations aim to maintain their legitimacy by simply adopting and not necessarily implementing institutions endorsed from external third parties, such as the government, public opinion, and other enterprises. The second stage is implementing the adopted institutions through intra-organizational interactions among various stakeholders who have quasi-autonomy from the core management group. Often, the core management group protects their legitimacy from various types of inner audience who have their own interests for implementing an adopted institution. These inner audiences are better able to monitor the real practices of the institution than outsiders. Two examples of such stakeholders on CDPs are human resource (HR) department and a labor group.
We analytically focus on the effect of institutionalized communication practices between the stakeholders, such as strategic integrations, communication routines, and collective decisionmakings.
Active communications can expose the core management group to the normative pressure from other stakeholders, thus, leading to higher chance of implementation of adopted institutions at the second stage of institutionalization. In short, the core management group sends a signal of legitimacy to communicating stakeholders by decreasing institutional decoupling.
By estimating the effect of intra-organizational legitimacy pressure, we try extending the theory of neo-institutionalism to intra-organizational processes of decoupling.
We identify three analytic questions according to the types of stakeholders who communicate with the core management group. [Q1] Do stronger communications with organizational environments have any effect on the decoupling of CDPs? [Q2] Does the integration between business strategies and the HR department reduce its decoupling? [Q3] Does either closer communication with employees or more involvement of employees in management decisionmakings reduce its decoupling?The dataset used for the empirical test is 2005 Workplace Panel Survey collected by the Korea Labor Institute, a government-supported organization. Two dependent variables are constructed from 14 career development programs. Adoption refers to the total number of adopted programs and decoupling is the gap between the number of programs adopted and of implemented programs.
Key independent variables are four scales for the communication channels with different audiences. (1) Environmental contacts, which estimates [Q1], is a weighted sum of the following five questionnaire items: whether a firm subscribed to personnel magazines has regular contacts with other firms’ personnel departments, consults with CEOs’ associations, has benchmarked other firms’ personnel practices, and has consulted with consulting firms for the past three years. (2) Integration between business strategies and HR department, which estimates [Q2],is constructed by the sum of six questionnaire items that ask how well connected personnelrelated issues are to core business strategies by an ordinal scale in 1 to 5. (3) Worker-manager communication is a weighted sum of the following nine practices: employee-CEO meeting,manager’s workplace inspection, hot-line to manager, regular production-line meeting, annual employees’ survey, regular newsletter, bulletin boards, e-mail newsletter, and intra-net. (4)Labor-manager decision-making is the total score for how often workers are involved in the following six issue-domains: deciding management plans, introducing new devices and facilities,reforming working process and operation system, training workers, choosing corporate spin-offs or subcontracts, and job retrenchment. The last two variables jointly estimate [Q3].
Estimation results found that, controlling for all other factors, all four variables for outer/inner normative pressures significantly increased the number of adopted CDPs, whereas only workermanager communication, the third variable, significantly reduced the decoupling of adopted CDPs. Note that neither the integration between business strategies and HR department nor labor-manager decision-making has an effect on the level of decoupling. It might not be resource-based influences from intra-organizational stakeholders but normative agreements flowing through interactions between those stakeholders that effectively decrease decoupling.
We discuss limitations of our study and then lead to a rudimentary theoretical proposal that extends neo-institutionalism from inter-organization to intra-organizational dynamics.

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