Human Resource Centrality and Human Resource Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Leadership Learning Agility

Abstract

Purpose – Human Resource Management (HRM) is no more an administrative role but has become a strategic organizational competency, which has been found to be a contributing factor towards sustainable organizational success. Human Resource (HR) Centrality is a strategic role for HR professionals to be involved with organizational decision making and HR practices aligning with business goals. Based on Resource-Based View (RBV), the present study explores relationship between HR centrality and HR effectiveness and moderating role of Leadership Learning Agility (LLA) in service sector organizations in Pakistan.

Study Design/Methodology/Approach – The research conducted in this study was a quantitative research design with positivist research paradigm. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data from 180 HRD professionals, managers of private service-sector banking, telecommunication and IT organizations in Pakistan. To investigate the direct and moderating effects among the variables of the study, the proposed hypotheses were tested using the IBM SPSS Statistics and Hayes' PROCESS Macro (Model 1).

Results – The findings show that HR centrality positively influences HR effectiveness. Leadership Learning Agility also has a significant positive direct impact on HR effectiveness. The overall regression model accounts for a significant amount of variance in HR effectiveness. The interaction effect between HR centrality and Leadership Learning Agility, however, was not significant, suggesting that Leadership Learning Agility is not a moderator of the relationship between HR centrality and HR effectiveness.

Practical Implications – The results indicate that HR function must be strategically positioned to increase the effectiveness of HR in the organizations. Moreover, the ability of developing leaders to have high levels of learning agility can directly have a positive impact on HR outcomes without necessarily having a positive impact on the influence of HR centrality. It is therefore prudent for organizations to invest at the same time in strategic HR integration and leadership development to enhance organizational effectiveness.

Originality/Value – This study contributes to the RBV by discussing about HR centrality as a valuable organizational capability that improves HR effectiveness. It also enriches the strategic human resource management literature by empirically investigating the contextual variable of Leadership Learning Agility in the HR centrality–HR effectiveness relationship in service-sector organizations in Pakistan. The results offer empirical evidence findings in an emerging economy and add to knowledge of the contribution of strategic HR capabilities in supporting the effectiveness of the organization.

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