ABSTRACT
In 2002, I conducted a questionnaire survey of strategic HRM issues in leading companies in Taiwan. A directory of Taiwan’s leading companies published by the local CommonWealth magazine was used for sampling. Companies with less than 40 full-time employees were excluded. In total, the sample was made up of 553 firms from the manufacturing industry and 553 firms from the service industry. The contact for the study was the HR manager in each firm. I mailed each HR manager a cover letter and a questionnaire measuring strategic HRM activities. From the 1,106 companies, 198 questionnaires were returned. Missing data reduced the final dataset to 190, representing a reasonable response rate of 17 percent. Among the 190 firms in the sample, 152 were Taiwanese-owned, 18 were western-owned and joint ventures, and 20 were Japanese subsidiaries and joint ventures. The sample represented 128 (67 percent) manufacturing firms. The questionnaire measured four important issues of HRM: environmental factors influencing HRM decisions, changes in the HRM function during the past five years, current HRM practices and key challenges of HR functions in the next five years. We shall discuss these issues in the following section.
