What he\u2019s researching:<\/strong><\/p>\nAll of Park\u2019s research streams start with a big question: How can employees and employers thrive together?<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have different HR models in mind, as reflected in recent cases at Amazon, Google, Tesla and other companies,\u201d Park says. \u201cI study what HR practices and policies are effective under what circumstances, with specific focuses on compensation, workflow (or employee turnover) management, and employment relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n
Park says that compensation is \u201cat the core of any employment relationship.\u201d Professionals and academics generally agree that higher wages are better and that performance-based pay is philosophically good. However, people often express challenges in designing and implementing effective compensation practices because high wages cannot be used in all organizations and also because employees often disagree with the performance metrics, the basis of pay-for-performance plans.<\/p>\n
Rather than sticking to this well-worn territory, Park focused on pay allocation\u2014given a limited budget, how can organizations strategically allocate wages in a way that benefits employers and employees alike?<\/p>\n
In a recent study, Park and his colleagues, Seongsu Kim of Seoul National University and Li-Kuo Sung of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, suggest that both highly differentiated and highly compressed pay allocation can be effective, depending on whether employees are promotion-focused (centered on wishes, hopes and aspirations) or prevention-focused (centered on fulfilling duties and responsibilities). This concept is defined as \u201cregulatory focus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Park\u2019s research team theorized that when employees are strongly promotion-focused, they tend to see highly differentiated pay allocation as an opportunity to earn more in the future. But when they are strongly prevention-focused, they tend to see the interconnected nature of their works and therefore prefer compressed pay allocation. In testing the theory with 137 work teams in South Korea and 46 work teams in Taiwan, they found supportive evidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom a practical standpoint, our study shows that organizations can benefit by creating messages of pay differentials that are more promotion- (or prevention-) focused,\u201d Park says. \u201cFor example, when an organization allocates pay in a largely dispersed manner, it would be more effective to emphasize and provide additional opportunities to employees so that employees become more promotion-focused. In contrast, when an organization allocates pay in a compressed manner, it would be more effective to emphasize safety- and security-related issues in the workplace so that employees focus more on the nonloss-related issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
Park\u2019s interest in pay allocation led him to study pay secrecy issues as well. Past research has shown that pay secrecy is generally negative, but it is unknown whether situations exist where secrecy could be preferred. \u201cThe organization has to know what will happen when pay becomes transparent,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In one of his research articles, Park shows that pay transparency effects can be positive or negative depending on the organizational culture, particularly when it comes to the level of cooperation among employees. In a highly cooperative culture, highly paid employees are likely to be concerned about pay transparency because they can be negatively affected as targets of others\u2019 pay comparisons. In contrast, in a noncooperative culture, low-paid employees are likely to be concerned about pay transparency because their work stress and job insecurity can increase with amplified pay comparisons. Park says he found supportive evidence of this theory using a sample of 1,801 employees on 319 teams in 49 organizations in South Korea.<\/p>\n
Park studies other forms of HR practices, including flexible work practices and employee workflow management. His research shows that the use of flexible work practices, such as maternity leave, can negatively affect employees\u2019 career outcomes, especially when managers view their use as a lifestyle, rather than productivity increase, motivation.<\/p>\n
For management, simply providing flexible work practices is not effective. \u201cThey have to inform managers and supervisors on why the use of these flexible practices can really benefit employees in their organizational lives,\u201d Park says.<\/p>\n
Throughout the stream of his research, Park wants to identify different sets of HR practices, namely HR systems, that are effective in different circumstances. In his current research, he categorizes various HR practices into two sets\u2014inducement-enhancing practices and expectancy-enhancing practices\u2014and investigates how the mix of the two HR practice sets influence the relationship between employer and employees.<\/p>\n
Students taking Park\u2019s classes can expect to explore HR practices with the analytical rigor he brings to his own work. \u201cI design my courses on an evidence basis,\u201d he says. \u201cI give students opportunities to think about good HR practices in different business environments. The takeaway messages after the discussion are mostly grounded in research evidence. In addition, in my other courses, I give students opportunities to actually analyze the HR data and find implications out of them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you say \u2018people are our best asset,\u2019 what do you really mean? Tae-Youn Park\u2019s evidence-based research can help companies choose the right HR models for success. Tae-Youn (Ty) Park Who: Tae-Youn (Ty) Park joined Vanderbilt\u2019s Organization Studies group as an assistant professor in 2012. He has been a researcher since 2003, first at Seoul […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1110,"featured_media":10692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[105,104],"class_list":["post-10684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-intellectual-capital","tag-hr","tag-tae-youn-park"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10684"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10687,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10684\/revisions\/10687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltbusiness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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