value the range of benefits available to me n/a 95% 94% 95% 92%
We create real influence over our working lives 75% 74% 76% 76% 74%

It is fair to say that John Lewis is able to influence partners psychological contract through their HRM practices positively but they need to be careful about the transactional psychological contract (extrinsic) of their employees and continue to improve in order to keep their competitive advantage during difficult financial times.

STRATEGIES TO GENERATE HCA AND ITS INFLUENCE ON EMPLOYEES’ MOTIVATION AND COMMITMENT

Another way to approach HRM practices is to conceptualise them as a tool to generate human capital advantage (HCA) through training, talent management and continuous improvement to develop core competencies against competitors.

The co-owned / partnership is one of the prime element that gives John Lewis a competitive edge to build their HCA and JLP puts significant level of efforts in their rigorous recruitment and selection processes (Online tests, Application form, Video Interview, Assessment centre) to secure partnership behaviour from the beginning and hire candidates who are not only skilful and talented but also align overall with organizational cultural values. This approach is based on universalist / ‘best practices’ (Preffer, 1998), however, due to the rigorousness and length of the recruitment and selection process JLP incurs huge cost to hire people, hence, it is imperative for JLP to keep employee turnover low; one of the way they encounter this problem is to offer higher rate in comparison to industry’s pay rate.

It shouldn’t be a surprised that John Lewis also employs ‘best fit’ approach to generate human capital advantages (Pfeffer, 1998). JLP introduced an IT Apprenticeship with the Queen Mary University of London which will help apprentices to receive BSc (Hons) in IT while working in John Lewis’s IT department, which is aligned with business strategy to grow retail’s business through e-commerce in the digital world (JPL, 2016).