IPA as a Theoretical Concept of Evaluating Various Elements in HRM

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) was primarily presented by Martilla and James (1977) as a simple evaluating marketing tool. However, as suggested by Slack (1994), IPA can also be used to evaluate internal services, in other words companies’ internal organization. Purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical concept of IPA in human resource management (HRM) for evaluating employee satisfaction with review of elements which are considered important in HRM theory. Therefore the main goal is to present IPA as an important tool used to evaluate relations between two factors, employees (importance) and lower management (performance). In order to confirm the theoretical hypothesis made by previous researches it can be suggested that IPA can be implemented in HRM’s evaluation of important factors which indicates employee satisfaction. Furthermore the procedure showed the limitation of previous findings, which prompted the research. Authors will demonstrate its conclusion based on theoretical aspects used in IPA concept. At first IPA concept will be presented as a theoretical concept and then transferred from external to internal matters and its possible implementation in HRM process. Consequently the analysis showed that although IPA concept was introduced for marketing purposes, it can possibly be implicated in others, such as HRM.