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The automotive industry plays a significant and valuable role in the North American economy. The industry accounts for 12 percent of the USA's manufacturing-related gross domestic product, one in every seven jobs in the USA ([76] US International Trade Commission, 2002), and the manufacture of 12.3 million vehicles in 2002 ([46] Industry Canada, 2003).
Given its substantial economic impact, it is not surprising that a great deal of attention has been and continues to be focused by industry players, governing bodies, and researchers on how to manage automotive manufacturing. There is little doubt that to date a great deal of this focus has been placed on managing the technical side of automobile manufacturing, and this is seen in the extensive literature on the topic. Yet, we know significantly less about how to manage the human side of the industry. The purpose of the current study, therefore, was to take stock of the empirical research describing human resource management in the North American automotive industry. Based on this review, we proposed and tested a model of high performance work systems in the automotive context using existing empirical data on relevant variables.
In this paper, we first present a review of research on work systems and human resource management in the automobile industry. It is on this basis that we then present our model, the criteria and procedure for creating the sample suitable for meta-analysis, and the study results. As with most meta-analyses, the criteria are restrictive, and in this case leads to a dataset consisting of a small number of studies compared to the large body of HRM research available. We acknowledge that this data set reflects only selective organizations in the North American automotive industry that have collaborated with social science researchers; and as a such, the findings should be interpreted with caution as the conclusions derive from a non-representative sample of automobile manufacturing employees representing in, some cases, a small number of statistical relationships.
We hypothesized associations between model variables, and tested these relationships using 14 empirical studies conducted in the North American automotive sector. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the study results for research on human resource management in the automotive sector.
Theory and background
Automotive work systems
Automobile...