New methods for new data? An overview and illustration of quantitative inductive methods for HRM research
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"Data is the new oil", in short, data would be the essential source of the ongoing fourth industrial revolution, which has led some commentators to assimilate too quickly the quantity of data to a source of wealth in itself, and consider the development of big data as an quasi direct cause of profit. Human resources management is not escaping this trend, and the accumulation of large amounts of data on employees is perceived by some entrepreneurs as a necessary and sufficient condition for the construction of predictive models of complex work behaviors such as absenteeism or job performance. In fact, the analogy is somewhat misleading: unlike oil, there are no major issues here concerning the production of data (whose flows are generated continuously and at low cost by various information systems), but rather their ”refining”, i.e. the operations necessary to transform this data into a useful product, namely into knowledge. This transformation is where the methodological challenges of data valuation lie, both for practitioners and for academic researchers. Considerations on the methods applicable to take advantage of the possibilities offered by these massive data are relatively recent, and often highlight the disruptive aspect of the current ”data deluge” to point out that this evolution would be the source of a revival of empiricism in a ”fourth paradigm” based on the intensive and ”agnostic” exploitation of massive amounts of data in order to bring out new knowledge, following a purely inductive logic. Although we do not adopt this speculative point of view, it is clear that data-driven approaches are scarce in quantitative HRM studies. However, there are well-established methods, particularly in the field of data mining, which are based on inductive approaches. This area of quantitative analysis with an inductive aim is still relatively unexplored in HRM ( apart from typological analyses). The objective of this paper is first to give an overview of data driven methods that can be used for HRM research, before proposing an empirical illustration which consists in an exploratory research combining a latent profile analysis and an exploration by Gaussian graphical models.
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