The impact of human resources flexibility on crisis management: Evidence from Jordanian manufacturing companies

Abstract

A human resources administration must be flexible to provide the human element with capacity to respond to crises. The current study seeks to test the effect of human resources flexibility on crisis management and the impact of skill flexibility, behavioral flexibility, and human resource practices flexibility on crisis management. The research sample consists of 445 managers working at Al-Hassan Industrial Estate in Jordan. A questionnaire was developed to measure human resources flexibility and organizational crisis management. SPSS was employed to analyze the collected data and test the hypotheses; multiple and simple regression were used for testing the hypotheses.The study results revealed that the mean of human resource flexibility is moderate in industrial organizations (2.86). Moreover, the mean of crisis management is moderate (3.36). The findings also showed that human resources flexibility has a statistical effect on crisis management at a level of 0.05. Besides, the correlation coefficient was 0.66 and R2 was 0.441. Hypotheses testing demonstrated that skill flexibility has the largest impact on crisis management; the Beta value was 0.409. Behavior flexibility has a statistical impact on crisis management. Whereas human practices flexibility does not have a statistical impact on crisis management due to the value of Sig = 0.102.

Keywords

• crisis containment
• human resources flexibility
• industrial companies
• organizational crisis management
• skill flexibility