HRM Scholars Research Articles

Contemporary developments in Green (environmental) HRM scholarship

This article reviews the contemporary literature on Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) to contextually frame the seven articles appearing in this Special Issue. Review findings reveal the embedded nature of GHRM workplace-level practices and additional research needing to focus on HR systems, individual behaviors and emerging theoretical lenses. As a set, the articles herein span green recruitment, competencies, employee participation, financial/environmental performance links, and contextual issues utilizing national culture, paradox, and stakeholder theories. By recognizing such multi-level dynamics, HRM scholars and practitioners can enhance GHRM initiatives that stimulate progress toward workplace environmental sustainability.

State-of-the-Art and Future Directions for HRM from a Paradox Perspective: Introduction to the Special Issue

Managing HRM related tensions is a matter of practical and theoretical significance. Despite increasing interest among HRM scholars in understanding the nature of tensions in managing the employment relationship, attempts to explore these tensions that go beyond the mapping of dualities or naming of the negative aspects of tensions are somewhat rare. Furthermore, discussions on managing HRM tensions tend to be of limited value for practitioners due to their overly abstract nature contributing to what several commentators lament is a growing theory-practice gap in HRM research. This Special Issue aims to advance the discussion on tensions in HRM by drawing on a recent paradox perspective from organization theory. Along with the contributors to the Special Issue, we explore how a paradox perspective can support HRM researchers in a more systematic analysis of types of HRM paradoxes and tensions and in deepening awareness of practical strategies for coping actively and constructively with tensions. In this introduction to the Special Issue, we first provide a synthesis of the features of a paradox perspective and contrast it with previous research on tensions in organization theory and HRM. Next, we illustrate how a paradox perspective can be applied to analyzing HRM tensions presenting key examples of such analysis. We then introduce the contributions to this Special Issue all of which draw, albeit in different ways, on a paradox perspective on HRM. Finally, we explore opportunities for future research. In particular, we focus on the need to move from a duality perspective to a paradox perspective on HRM, on opportunities to explore the links between HRM, paradox and organizational sustainability and on the skills and capabilities needed for coping with HRM paradoxes both at individual and organizational/HRM levels.

Can Employability Do the Trick? Revealing Paradoxical Tensions and Responses in the Process of Adopting Innovative Employability Enhancing Policies and Practices in Organizations

This study uses a ‘paradox lens’ to contribute to employability debates in HRM by examining the effectiveness of employability enhancing policies and practices (hereafter EP&Ps) in three case organizations. We identify three organizing paradoxes reflecting the complexities of the Dutch economic, political and socio-cultural contexts. In line with the EP&Ps' competing goals, we label these: the ‘(inverted) flexibility/commitment paradox’; ‘self-management/(human-resource) management paradox’; and the ‘sustainability/effectiveness and efficiency paradox’. We further analyse how their underlying paradoxical tensions spill over and create role-performance, belonging and learning paradoxical tensions at the micro-level and how these cumulatively impact managers' and employees' responses to EP&Ps. We then explore how HRM tries to actively go beyond ‘reinforcing paradox cycles’ by creating awareness and stimulating contextual change to foster the wider adoption of EP&Ps. In conclusion, we argue that the paradox lens can inform HRM scholars and labour market stakeholders to search for innovative ways to study and govern contemporary employability issues.

Well-being and performance: measurement issues for HRM research

The more recent focus on the link between HRM practice and organisational systems has been on the potential benefits of mutuality in employment relationships. The key to this notion of mutuality is the connection between worker well-being and performance. Although a common area of study for psychology, this relationship has received limited attention from HRM scholars. However, these initial endeavours have raised some concerns about measurement. First, there appears little consensus about which particular facet of well-being is most crucial to determining performance and, second, concern has been expressed over the validity of the different approaches taken to assessing performance. Our study addresses these issues by exploring the relationships between three different measures of well-being and two different measures of performance amongst a student cohort. Results show that life satisfaction shares a significant, positive relationship with objective performance ratings, while attentiveness, a facet of positive affect, shares a significant positive relationship with subjective performance. We explore the reasons why these different facets of well-being might be related to our different performance assessments and then, in giving consideration to these findings, discuss their implications for the measurement of well-being and of performance in workplace studies.

Current Themes in Behavioral Business Ethics: Implications for HR Training and Development

A growing responsibility for ethics training and development has been ascribed to human resources professionals, not only by global HRM and business ethics scholars, but also, within organizations ...

State-of-the-Art and Future Directions for Green Human Resource Management: Introduction to the Special Issue

The topic of environmental sustainability is generating increased concern among business executives, governments, consumers, and management scholars. As these stakeholders struggle with the challenges and opportunities presented by an array of environmental issues, HRM scholars and practitioners alike have been relatively slow to engage in the ongoing discussions and debates. Through this special issue on Green HRM, we seek to stimulate the field of HRM to expand its role in the pursuit of environmentally sustainable business. In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide an overview of the articles that appear in the special issue. Next we present a detailed discussion of research questions that arise from a consideration of several functional HRM practices, including performance management; training, development, and learning; compensation and rewards; and organizational culture. We conclude by describing opportunities for research at the intersection of strategic HRM and environmental management. If pursued with vigor, research addressing this extensive agenda could begin to establish a healthy field of Green HRM scholarship.

The greening of strategic HRM scholarship

The topic of environmental sustainability is attracting increased attention among management scholars. Despite its importance to managers, employees, customers and other stakeholders, however, there is very little scholarship that considers the role of human resource management systems in organizations striving to achieve environmental sustainability. In this article, we propose several specific questions that such scholarship could address. By seeking answers to these questions, HRM scholars could contribute to improved organizational effectiveness and at the same time develop new theoretical models that more adequately reflect the complexity of organizational phenomena.

Environmental dynamism, human resource flexibility, and firm performance: analysis of a multi-level causal model

While strategic HRM scholars have conceptualized HR flexibility as an important source of sustainable superior firm performance in dynamic environments, the process through which HR flexibility creates value for the firm has not been empirically investigated. Based on a study of 98 manufacturing and 103 service firms from a wide array of industries in India, this paper attempts to illuminate the black box of causal linkages between environmental dynamism, flexibility of human assets, and firm level human-, operational-, and financial-outcomes by developing and testing a multi-level causal model. Evidence indicates that HR flexibility mediates the influence of environmental dynamism on firm performance and that irrespective of the nature of the industry and the degree of environmental turbulence, superior firm performance ensues when HR flexibility as actually possessed by the firm matches the environmental demands for such flexibility as perceived by the firm managers. The results also support the notion of HR value chain that postulates that HR system has direct impact on firm-level HR outcomes which are most proximal, and its effects on increasingly more distal operational- and financial-outcomes are mediated by HR outcomes. The findings of the study suggest that HR practices as a system have both direct and indirect (mediated by behavioral flexibility) effects on firm-level HR outcomes. Existence of significant direct effects signifies that HR practices play an important role as a structural mechanism in achieving superior firm performance.

Critical social science, pragmatism and the realities of HRM

The tendency of HRM writers to act as prescriptive advisors and legitimators to corporate management needs to be balanced if not replaced by critical-analytical and social scientific research. The notion of the sociological imagination provides inspiration and valuable guidelines for a type of realist research which, in addition to informing people directly implicated in human resourcing activities, has the potential to inform democratic processes as opposed to furthering the particular interests of one segment of society. To do this, it is helpful to adopt a realist and a philosophically pragmatist style of thinking. In line with pragmatist principles, it is argued that we are better placed to get to grips with the realities of human resourcing principles and practices if we conceptualise ‘HRM’ in terms of labour or employment management generally rather than treat it as just one variant of employment management. It is also important to appreciate the vital connection between HRM and bureaucracy. As a ‘vignette’ from research on HR processes in a small-to-medium enterprise (SME) illustrates, pragmatism also provides a methodological base for theory development and research on HRM processes, working in the sociological-imagination tradition. Pragmatic realism also has implications for how HRM scholars engage with the world outside the university.

The Strongest Link: Legitimacy of Top Management Diversity, Sex Stereotypes and the Rise of Women in Human Resource Management 1995 – 2004

Over the last decades, HRM scholars associated the inclusion of women into HRM with the occupation's loss of status. Such views have difficulties to explain more recent developments in Europe that show a co-evolution of feminization and status increase of HRM. In this article, we review these developments and offer an explanation that accounts for them. Linking neo-institutional arguments with literature on sex stereotypes, we suggest that allocating women to HRM offers a solution for organizations to deal with growing demands for enhancing diversity within top management without giving up the traditional division of female and male work. We show how the patterns of the inclusion of women into HRM in 11 European countries between 1995 and 2004 support this explanation. Key words: HRM, occupational status, occupational feminization, sex stereotypes, institutional pressures 'The gender composition of the board can affect the quality of (...) the financial performance of the firm. (CampbeU/Minguez-Vera 2008: 435) 'The personnel woman is a good example of the educated girl who has channelled her energies and abilities into the business community, in a job well above the rank-and-file level. (Merkel 1963: 121) Occupational feminization and status of HRM: Friends or foes? Over the last decades, there has been a remarkable increase of women working in the field of human resource management. For example, the share of female HR professionals in the US increased from 27.3 per cent in 1970 to 53.3 per cent in 1990 (Blau et al. 1998). Similar trends can be observed in other countries like the UK (Legge 1987) and Australia (Trudinger 2004). Today, in numerous industrialized countries, women represent the majority of HR professionals (Brandi et al. 2008a). Scholars examining historical developments of the HRM occupation have observed a co-evolution of changes in female representation and status of HRM: in the past, the inclusion of women in HRM has accompanied the demise of the HRM profession or hindered its ability to gain full status (Simpson/Simpson 1969). Reversely, a decrease in numbers of women has accompanied an improvement in the occupation's status. In trying to account for these developments, scholars emphasized that the representation of women within HRM depends on the attractiveness of the occupation to men (e.g., Legge 1987; Roos/Manley 1996). As long as HRM is not important at the overall level of organization and society, men are not interested and leave the positions to women. When the occupation's importance increases, men become interested in entering the field and displace women. A core argument for why women get displaced is that employers tend to prefer men for HRM when the occupation's status is high (Reskin/Roos 1990). For example, when the upcoming of scientific testing instruments shifted the image of HRM from a welfare to a professional function, the share of male HR specialists increased (Trudinger 2004: 104). A close relationship between status decrease and rise of women's representation or vice versa could be observed from the early stages of HRM until the end of the 1980s (Roos/Manley 1996). More current documentation of feminization and status of HRM cannot be found in the literature. In this article we present data filling this gap by reporting the percentage of women working in HRM (on the staff and the director level) and linking it to the status of HRM in 1995 and 2004. Using a large company level data set from 11 Western European countries we find a picture that differs considerably from the inverse relationship between female representation and status seen in the past Between 1995 and 2004 the percentage of women in HRM increased significantly and at the same time the status of HRM rose. Our data indicates the co-evolution of inclusion of women and rise of status in HRM. Arguments were used in the past to explain the inverse co-evolution, however, they have difficulties to account for co-occurrence of high occupational status and female representation. …

HRM and Performance: A Plea for Reflexivity in HRM Studies

abstract In this Counterpoint, we build on Paauwe's suggestions to take the field of HRM and Performance further. Rather than aiming for a synthesis or proposing a radical alternative, we argue that R(econstructive)‐reflexivity is needed for theorizing HRM. In particular, we bring in insights from critical studies on the notion of HRM, on the notion of performance, and on the theoretical relationship between them as a way to open up new research avenues and lines of interpretation. For each of these three aspects, we indicate how studying the employment relationship can be reframed. In particular, we emphasize practice‐oriented research as one possible research path for the field of HRM as it allows for an examination of HRM as a set of practices, embedded in a global economical, political and socio‐cultural context. We end our counterpoint by reflecting on reflexivity, proposing three practices that can guide HRM scholars in becoming reflexive in the ways they study HRM.

HRM in Transition Economies: The Case of Serbia

HRM in Transition Economies: The Case of SerbiaWhile the convergence vs. divergence debate has gained broad recognition among both HRM scholars and practitioners, it seems that a closer insight into current HRM developments in the South Eastern European transition economies has yet to be achieved. This paper, therefore, aims to highlight current HRM practices in Serbia and address possibilities for implementing the North American HRM model in a highly incompatible cultural setting. Investigation of HRM practices in Serbia is based on the "CRANET survey on Strategic International HRM" (Brewster et al., 2004) and on interviews with the HR managers of 38 randomly selected companies operating in Serbia. The Serbian national culture has been included a priori in the initial research design as an explanatory variable. Research findings suggest that both the incompetence of HR managers and professionals, as well as a slow-moving transition, need to be carefully considered to explain the distinctiveness of HRM in transition economies. On the other hand, national culture seems to be a key obstacle to the achievement of full convergence of performance appraisal and performance-related pay.

Towards a strategic model of employment reform in developing countries: explaining and remedying experience to date

The article argues for the importance of employment reform as a subject for international HRM scholarship. Employment reform has been one of the most significant, but also most neglected, recent initiatives in international HRM. Explanations by the World Bank and IMF for the poorer than expected outcomes of reform to date emphasize the importance of political commitment. They are compared with explanations for the similarly poor outcomes of downsizing in industrialized country organizations, which emphasize strategy, diagnosis, incrementalism and provision for retrenchees. Further clarification is provided by the results of field interviews in Ghana, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda and the UK. The article argues for a strategic approach to employment reform, one based on diagnosis and drawing on HRM expertise. It should take account of process factors in reform, make provision for the 'victims' of reform, loosen the link between employment reform and pay reform, and refine the role of donors in supporting reform. HRM practitioners and scholars have an important contribution to make to developing a new approach.

Towards a strategic model of employment reform in developing countries: explaining and remedying experience to date

The article argues for the importance of employment reform as a subject for international HRM scholarship. Employment reform has been one of the most significant, but also most neglected, recent initiatives in international HRM. Explanations by the World Bank and IMF for the poorer than expected outcomes of reform to date emphasize the importance of political commitment. They are compared with explanations for the similarly poor outcomes of downsizing in industrialized country organizations, which emphasize strategy, diagnosis, incrementalism and provision for retrenchees. Further clarification is provided by the results of field interviews in Ghana, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda and the UK. The article argues for a strategic approach to employment reform, one based on diagnosis and drawing on HRM expertise. It should take account of process factors in reform, make provision for the 'victims' of reform, loosen the link between employment reform and pay reform, and refine the role of donors in supporting reform. HRM practitioners and scholars have an important contribution to make to developing a new approach.