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Electronic human resource management and the future of human resource management
Edited by Dr Hal G. Gueutal
Introduction
The rapid development of the internet during the last decade has also entailed the advance of electronic human resource management (e-HRM). Customarily, it is agreed that e-HRM leads to considerable changes and therefore should be taken as an important development in the HR field ([29] Lepak and Snell, 1998; [28] Lengnick-Hall and Moritz, 2003; [18] Gueutal and Stone, 2005). Given this view, a basic research topic refers to the organizational adoption of e-HRM ([42] Strohmeier, 2007). Beyond the mere state of adoption, a special question relates to relevant factors of adoption, i.e. is e-HRM a universal activity that will be adopted by (virtually) all organizations by and by or are there factors that systematically separate adopting and non-adopting organizations? Given the manifest national differences in the adoption of various other HR activities ([8] Brewster et al. , 2004) a special aspect of this question refers to cross-national differences in e-HRM adoption due to nationally differing influence factors.
In the interim, there is a certain body of empirical research that addresses organizational adoption ([3] Ball, 2001; [4] Beamish et al. , 2002; [30] Martin and Jennings, 2002; [11] Comacchio and Scapolan, 2004; [19] Hausdorf and Duncan, 2004; [20] Hoi, 2006; [16] Florkowski and Olivas-Luján, 2006; [36] Parry and Wilson, 2006; [35] Olivas-Luján et al. , 2007; [37] Panayotopoulou et al. , 2007; [43] Teo et al. , 2007; [17] Galanaki and Panayotopoulou, 2008; [25] Keim and Weitzel, 2008; [27] Lau and Hooper, 2008). Basically, these studies can be categorized by their regional and functional focus. Concerning the regional focus, most studies relate to a single country ([37] Panayotopoulou et al. , 2007), while cross-national studies ([16] Florkowski and Olivas-Luján, 2006) are rare and restricted to a few countries. Concerning the functional focus, one can distinguish studies that address the adoption of general e-HRM ([27] Lau and Hooper, 2008) from studies that focus the adoption of specific functional subset of e-HRM, such as e-recruiting ([25] Keim and Weitzel, 2008) or e-learning ([30] Martin and Jennings, 2002). Customarily, most studies address the current state of adoption thereby accordingly yielding the result of a meanwhile wide-spread adoption. Quite contrary, factors...