High Commitment Management Practices Research Articles

High commitment management practices re-examined: The case of Indian call centres

Considerable debate exists in the West about the effectiveness of high commitment management (HCM) practices in reducing the negative features associated with work in mass-production call centres. This debate has been glossed over the Indian context. Addressing the gap by critically examining the role of HCM practices in Indian call centres, this article highlights the crucial influence of the organizational agenda and the Indian sociocultural milieu. The findings support the crossvergence thesis while confirming that HCM practices rarely undermine the organizational imperative of control. Indeed, organizational interests prevail, being manifest via the ‘sacrificial HR strategy’. Clearly, employer organizations committed to promoting employee well-being and reducing attrition need to examine issues of job design, task demands and psychological contract obligations apart from implementing HCM practices.

‘Being yourself ’ in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control

This article extends research about high-commitment management practices in tightly controlled work environments typified by the call centre. One promising research avenue suggests that normative management systems in such contexts, involving ‘fun’ exercises and culture programmes, etc., are more about distracting employee attention away from other, more taxing controls. This article develops such an approach by exploring the specific nature and conditions of such distraction. An empirical study of a call centre in which employees were encouraged to ‘ just be themselves’ (in relation to lifestyle differences, sexuality, diverse identities, etc.) reveals how the distractions are partly informed by the dysfunctions of existing technical, bureaucratic and conventional cultural controls, all of which homogenize workers. Furthermore, the new regime not only serves to distract employees, but proves instrumental in capturing their sociality, energy and ‘authentic’ or ‘non-work’ personalities as emotional labour. At the same time, it gives rise to some contestation and less individualistic forms of authenticity. These outcomes have wider implications for our understanding of worker autonomy in and around hybrid control systems.

The effects of private equity and buy-outs on HRM in the UK and the Netherlands

Regulatory authorities, politicians and trade unions across Europe have recently accused private equity institutions of improving the performance of buy-outs merely by reducing employment costs with negative implications for jobs, working conditions and training investments. These claims are assessed by analysing high commitment management practices and changes in these practices in private-equity backed and non-private equity backed buy-outs in the UK and the Netherlands using a large-scale representative sample that combines both questionnaire and archival data. We find that both private equity backed buy-outs compared to non-private equity backed buy-outs, and Dutch buy-outs compared to UK buy-outs, are less likely to report introducing new high commitment management practices but do not on average reduce high commitment management practices. The findings suggest private equity backed buy-outs represent only a limited adaptation of the European social model.

Focusing on the software of managing health workers: what can we learn from high commitment management practices?

Knowledge of what constitutes best practice in human resource management (HRM) in public-oriented services is limited and the operational aspects of managing health workers at provision level have been poorly studied. The magnet hospital concept offers some insights into HRM practices that are leading to high commitment. These have been shown to lead to superior performance in not only industrial business firms, but also service industries and the public service. The mechanisms that drive these practices include positive psychological links between managers and staff, organizational commitment and trust. Conditions for successful high commitment management (HiCoM) include health service managers with a strong vision and able to transmit this vision to their staff, appropriate decision spaces for healthcare managers and a pool of reasonable well-trained health workers. For this, adequate remuneration is the first condition. Equally important are the issues of cultural fit and of 'commitment'. What would staff expect from management in return for their commitment to the organization? Salary buys indeed time of employees, but other practices ensure their commitment. Only if these drivers are understood will managers be able to make their HRM practices more responsive to the needs and expectations of the health workers.

National culture and high commitment management

This paper examines the relationship between national culture and high commitment management (HCM). A model linking national culture and HCM is developed and hypotheses concerning the relationship between national culture and the take‐up of specific HCM practices are derived. Empirical results demonstrating the relationship between national culture and the take‐up of particular HCM practices across nine countries are presented. The paper further establishes that the adoption of certain individual HCM practices is more closely associated with superior employee performance in countries with certain cultural characteristics than in others. However, when HCM is implemented as a package of practices, it is found to be associated with superior employee performance across different cultural settings. The paper concludes that national culture plays an exogenous determining role in the adoption of HCM practices, with the result that the globalisation of HCM practices should be undertaken with sensitivity.

CAN WE SPEAK OF A HIGH COMMITMENT MANAGEMENT ON THE SHOP FLOOR?*

ABSTRACTThe Commitment model à la Walton has been a key element in conceptions of human resource management (HRM). Is there though any evidence of its application to production workers? Drawing on the HRM literature the authors first develop some measures of practices which might be thought to contribute to high commitment management (HCM). Having acquired data on the extent to which organizations adopt these practices the authors then, using latent variable analysis, assess whether there is a common structure underlying it which represents some kind of HCM‐type approach to labour. In so doing they develop a construct to measure HCM relevant to manual workers. Basing the analysis on data from a representative sample of manufacturing plants in the UK, they conclude that HCM is being practised, albeit to a very varying degree.The research also reveals a growth in the use of HCM practices between 1986 and 1990, and that this has been mainly in practices already popular in 1986; hence the increased use of HCM has been more in plants for whom it was relatively insignificant in 1986, rather than a further heightening of its significance in plants for which it was important before. Using multiple regression analysis, the authors are also able to show that organizational factors rather than factors exogenous to the organization are significantly related to both the level of HCM, and its rate of change between 1986 and 1990. of overwhelming importance is the extent of the strategic integration of personnel management. the authors draw out the relevance of the study for the wider debate about HRM. In particular the results add some support for Walton's and Guest's universalistic theories of HCM, as opposed to what have been called matching or contingency theories of HCM, according to which it is only likely to be found in specific contexts where, for example, high quality is important for competitive advantage.

Teaching High-Commitment Management the High-Commitment Way

High-commitment management practices—including the use of self-managed work teams, broad job descriptions, performance-based compensation, and high levels of employee participation in decision making—are becoming increasingly popular. How can business students best learn to manage effectively in the high-commitment workplace? Drawing on the management education literature and the author's teaching experiences, this article argues that high-commitment management can most effectively be taught the high-commitment way by modeling analogous practices in the classroom and then analyzing the group's own experience to illuminate the distinctive dynamics of participatory management.