The challenge, of course, is very much to move on from a general genuflection to the importance of context to models which incorporate the most vital contingencies Purcell A key implication, however, is that analytical HRM is deeply sceptical about claims of universal applicability for particular HR practices or clusters of practices, such as the lists offered in the works of the US writer Jeffery Pfeffer e.
This does not rule out the search for general principles in the management of work and people—far from it—but it does caution strongly against prescription at the level of specific HR practices Becker and Gerhart ; Youndt et al.
A deep respect for context also implies that we make an attempt to understand the goals of HRM within the wider context of the goals and politics of firms. Like personnel management before it, MHRM has a tendency to begin with surveys or case studies of favourite practices, such as degree appraisal, which never raise the question of what the overarching HRM principles might be or how they might situate within management's general goals for the organization. This stems, to some extent, from the influence of psychology in MHRM, which does not offer a theory of business.
One of the benefits of the strategic and international schools of HRM, both more concerned with the economic and social motives of firms, is that they have opened an analysis of strategic HR goals and their relationship to wider organizational goals e. Evans ; Wright and Snell ; Boxall and Purcell This helps us to guard against two erroneous extremes.
This misunderstands the plurality of organizational effectiveness. Lees ; Gooderham et al. There are two drivers of this trend in analysis. One stems from the debate in SHRM concerning the need to show how human resources contribute to business viability and might lay a basis for sustained competitive advantage.
To make the resource-based view of the firm truly useful, we need to show how HRM helps create valuable capabilities and helps erect barriers to imitation Mueller ; Boxall and Purcell ; Wright et al. A second key driver stems from the realization that to work well, HR policies must be effectively enacted by line managers and must positively enhance employee attitudes and encourage productive behaviors e.
Guest , ; Wright and Boswell ; Purcell ; Purcell et al. This means that notions such as organizational culture and constructs associated with psychological contracting and social exchange, which have been important in the companion discipline of organizational behavior OB , are now being integrated into models of the process of HRM. We have embarked on a long-overdue process of investigating the way in which HR policies and practices affect job satisfaction, trust-in-management, attitudinal commitment, discretionary job behavior, behavioral commitment, and beyond.
This extremely important analytical development has quite a job to do. On the one hand, it means that HRM must become better integrated with theory in organizational behavior and with other accounts of how HRM works, such as those in industrial relations IR and labor economics.
It also means that HRM research must become more sophisticated methodologically. Not only are there are issues around the way HRM researchers measure the presence or otherwise of HR practices and systems Gerhart et al. These reviews show that a huge proportion of the studies measuring both HR practices of some kind and firm performance have found associations all right—but between the former and past performance, thus leaving us poorly placed to assert that causality runs from the selected HR practices to performance.
This stems from the preponderance of cross-sectional studies, which actually pick up historical financial data while asking about current HR practices, and the existence of very few genuinely longitudinal studies. This brings us to our final point about analytical HRM: it is concerned with assessing outcomes. This is obvious in terms of the way in which SHRM has generated a slew of studies on the HRM—performance link; however, in the light of what we have just said about the mediating role of employee attitudes and behavior, p.
HRM research is taking on board the question of mutuality e. Guest , ; Peel and Boxall ; it is examining the extent to which employer and worker outcomes are mutually satisfying and, thus, more sustainable in our societies over the long run. It is, therefore, becoming less true to say that HRM is dominated by fascination with management initiatives, as was very much true of the literature of the s.
HRM is moving on, as Legge argues. It is becoming more interactional, a process that will inevitably challenge other disciplines offering a narrative about how employees experience work and which will better equip HRM research to speak to the public policy debate. In our view, then, analytical HRM has three important characteristics.
As a management discipline, HRM draws insights, models, and theories from cognate disciplines and applies them to real world settings. It is characteristic of such disciplines that they beg, steal, and borrow from more basic disciplines to build up a credible body of theory, and make no apology for it. The conception of HRM that we advance here is not a narrow subject area.
The narrowness of perceiving HRM as solely what HR departments do where they exist or of perceiving HRM as only about one style of people management are enemies of the subject's relevance and intellectual vigor. So, too, are the excesses of academic specialization. The same could be said for marketing.
In the service—profit chain Heskett et al. HRM has much to offer here. Our aim, then, is to foster a more integrated conception of HRM with much better connections to the way production is organized in firms and the way workers experience the whole management process and culture of the organization. We see HRM as the management discipline best placed to assert the importance of work and employment systems in company performance and the role of such systems, embedded as they are in sectoral and societal resources and institutional regimes, to national economic performance and well-being.
In taking this view, we oppose the way writers in general or strategic management continue to downplay the importance of work organization and people management Boxall and Purcell HRM is central to developing the skills and attitudes which drive good execution. This in itself is enormously important but, more than this, the contribution of HRM is dynamic: it either helps to foster the kind of culture in which clever strategies are conceived and reworked over time or, if handled badly, it hinders the dynamic capability of the firm.
In our assessment, more work is needed to reframe general or strategic management so that it assigns appropriate value to work and employment systems and the organizational and sectoral-societal contexts which nurture or neglect them. We designed the Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management to place emphasis on the analytical approach we have just outlined. In the first part, p.
This begins with Bruce Kaufman's review of the history of HRM Chapter 2 , tracing key intellectual and professional developments over the last years.
US developments naturally play a central role in the chapter but Kaufman also draws in research on Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and other parts of the world. In Chapter 3 , Peter Boxall asks the question: what are employers seeking through engaging in HRM and how do their goals for HRM relate to their broader business goals?
The chapter emphasizes the ways in which employers try to adapt effectively to their specific economic and socio-political context, arguing that the critical goals of HRM are plural and inevitably imply the management of strategic tensions. This then leads to chapters which cover the relationship between HRM and three major academic disciplines: economics, strategic management, and organization theory.
Damian Grimshaw and Jill Rubery examine the connections with economics in Chapter 4. They highlight key unanswered questions and call for an expanded understanding of the role of strategic HRM. He shows how these traditions have, to some extent, been applied to analysis in HRM and indicates how they could be more fully applied to enhance our understanding of patterns of HRM in the workplace. The following two chapters focus on particular theoretical perspectives, drawn from organizational behavior and industrial relations, that assist us to interpret how the processes of HRM affect workers.
In Chapter 7 , David Guest engages with the OB notion of psychological contracting, which accords a central role to mutuality questions, to how employees perceive and respond to employer promises. Reviewing research on worker well-being, he argues that greater use of high-commitment HR practices, involving greater making and keeping of promises by the employer, enhances the psychological contract and brings benefits to both parties.
This positive interpretation is juxtaposed with Chapter 8 in which Paul Thompson and Bill Harley contrast what they perceive as the fundamental premisses of HRM with the premisses of labor process theory LPT , an area of p.
In Chapter 7 , the glass of worker well-being is at least half-full, while in Chapter 8 it is clearly half-empty. In juxtaposing these chapters, we invite readers to decide which account they find more compelling. Thus, the first part of the book reviews theory which helps us to understand the management of work and employment but does so in a way that pays due respect to different theoretical and ideological premisses and to the diverse histories and contexts of HRM.
The core processes and functions of HRM reviewed here start with Chapter 10 on work organization in which Sharon Parker and John Cordery adopt a systems approach to outline the characteristics and outcomes for firms and workers of three archetypal work configurations: mechanistic, motivational, and concertive work systems. Please share your general feedback.
You can join in the discussion by joining the community or logging in here. You can also find out more about Emerald Engage. Visit emeraldpublishing. Answers to the most commonly asked questions here. Budapest: Gondolat Publishing House, 76— Karoliny, Z. Koubek, J. Morley, N. London: Routledge, — Larsen, H. Lewis, P. How the East Was Won. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lucas, R. Mayrhofer, W. Management Revue , 36— Michailova, S. London: Routledge, 1— Nikandrou, I.
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