Electronic Human Resource Management: Four Decades of Empirical Evidence

This paper reviews four decades of e-HRM (Electronic Human Resource Management) academic literature. Such a review is timely and relevant since e-HRM is one of the most implemented applications in organizations (Lee, 2011). The analysis of 299 articles reveals that one stream of e-HRM literature, dominated by IT-oriented scholars, investigates the essential factors to consider when implementing e-HRM technology, A second stream, dominated by organizational (and pure HRM) scholars, focuses on studying the consequences of e-HRM systems. The authors synthesize and discuss the full range of empirically studied factors, aiming to heighten awareness about the impact of e-HRM systems on management decisions and their consequences for organizations and employees. While technological factors were assumed to be most relevant for effectively automating personnel departments in the 70’s and 80’s, it was subsequently recognized that managing people and organizational factors was of vital importance for successful implementations. Next to positive operational consequences of e-HRM systems, relational and transformational consequences continue to gain importance. This review shows how e-HRM research is evolving from merely declaring assumptions towards enhancing the rigor of its conceptual and empirical basis.