ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter attempts to apply much of what has been developed in the preceding chapters in the context of a specific organisation: Nationwide Building Society. Chapter 6 illustrated the importance of employee and occupational context in understanding the response of employees to HR practices and here we examine how the responses of employees drive performance in a particular company context. As we will see, the search for links between people and performance in any particular organisation requires a series of integrated choices that must all support the ultimate aim of the analysis. Key among these choices is the selection of an appropriate performance benchmark for the business unit under consideration. Indeed, the problem in organisations tends not to be finding performance measures but selecting among them. The results in this chapter, which focus on corporate social responsibility, employee commitment, turnover and mortgages, are specific to Nationwide. Other companies in other industries with different business strategies may well find that other things matter. Employees in various occupations may respond in a variety of ways, as suggested in Chapter 6. This chapter illustrates how internal data can be used in conjunction with academic theory to identify important linkages between HR and performance. These results serve as an illustration of the HR-performance link, and they extend the work of Chapter 7, which examined precisely how this causal chain was initiated for professional knowledge workers.
