Single‐ and Multiple‐Informant Research Designs to Examine the Human Resource Management−Performance Relationship
比较了单一信息提供者和多信息提供者两种研究设计在分析人力资源管理与企业绩效关系时的差异，发现不同职位管理者（如HR经理和销售经理）的回答显著不同，混合数据可能导致错误结论，因此推荐使用多关键信息提供者设计。
During the last decades, many empirical studies have analysed the relationship between human resource management and firm performance. Despite the call for multiple‐rater designs, a relatively large number of researchers still rely on survey responses provided by a single informant in each organization. Single‐informant designs suffer from a number of problems, especially when the responses provided by different types of raters across firms are pooled into a single dataset prior to assessing their equivalence across raters. Using an illustration of the relationship between high performance work systems and firm performance, in this paper we observe that responses provided by managers holding different positions (human resource managers and sales managers) differ significantly and therefore pooling their responses into a single dataset may result in confusing conclusions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that differences arise in the estimated parameters when a multiple‐key‐informant approach, compared to a single‐informant design, is adopted. For these reasons, data collection using multiple key informants is recommended, based on the assumption that some raters in the firm will be more knowledgeable about the variables of interest than others.