Common Ground and Delegation: The Role Of Human Resource Management Practices

Much recent research suggests that firms need to increase their level of delegation to better cope with, for example, the challenges introduced by dynamic rapid environments and the need to engage more with external knowledge sources. However, there is less insight into the organizational preconditions of increasing delegation. We argue that key HR practices?namely, hiring, training and job-rotation?are associated with delegation of decision-making authority. These practices assist in the creation of shared knowledge conditions between managers and employees. In turn, such a ?common ground? influences the confidence with which managers delegate decision authority to employees, as managers improve their knowledge of the educational background, firm-specific knowledge, and perhaps even the possible actions of those to whom they delegate such authority. To test these ideas, we match a large-scale questionnaire survey with unique population-wide employer-employee data. We find evidence of a direct and positive influence of hiring decisions (proxied by common educational background), and the training and job rotation of employees on delegation. Moreover, we find a positive interaction between common educational background and job rotation.