Practitioner Experiences With Digitalization in Human Resource Management

This paper examines a knowledge gap regarding how HR practitioners experience the implementation of significant changes to policies and practices within their own function. It focuses on the challenges created by attempts to apply digital technologies to within-HR activities. Coding transcripts from semi-structured interviews with practitioners, we found support for a model of HR digitalization that relates the components of technology implementation, that is, technology, organization, and people (TOP), to its operational, strategic alignment, and strategic integration consequences. We also found that each of seven HR subfunctions uses different technologies to digitalize and at different paces of implementation, that we can array HR subfunctions along a continuum of consequences as they digitalize, and that technology implementation advances dynamically as it iterates over time through cycles of development and adjustment.