Human resource departments are key components in the people management system of nearly every medium-to-large organization in the industrial world. They provide a wide range of essential services ...relating to employees, including recruitment, compensation, benefits, training, and labor relations. A century ago, however, before the concept of human resource management had been invented, the supervision and care of employees at even the largest companies were conducted without written policies or formal planning, and often in harsh, arbitrary, and counterproductive ways.
How did companies such as United States Steel manage a workforce of 160,000 employees at dozens of plants without a specialized personnel or industrial relations department? What led some of these organizations to introduce human resources practices at the end of the nineteenth century? How were the earliest personnel departments structured and what were their responsibilities? And how did the theory and implementation of human resources management evolve, both within industry and as an academic field of research and teaching?
InManaging the Human Factor, Bruce E. Kaufman chronicles the origins and early development of human resource management (HRM) in the United States from the 1870s, when the Labor Problem emerged as the nation's primary domestic policy concern, to 1933 and the start of the New Deal. Through new archival research, an extensive review and synthesis of the historical and contemporary literatures, and case studies illustrating best (and worst) practices during this period, Kaufman identifies the fourteen ideas, events, and movements that led to the creation of specialized HRM departments in the late 1910s, as well as their further growth and development into strategic business units in the welfare capitalism period of the 1920s.
The research presented in this book not only uncovers many new aspects of the early development of personnel and industrial relations but also challenges central parts of the contemporary interpretation of the concept and evolution of HRM. Rich with insights on both the present and past of human resource management,Managing the Human Factorwill be widely regarded as the definitive account of the early history of employee management in American companies and a must-read for all those interested in the indispensable function of managing people in organizations.
This paper engages with Troth and Guest (2019) on psychology in HRM. I argue they misframe the central issue in debate. The real problem is not psychology per se but psychologisation—the drive to ...reduce explanation of macro‐level HRM outcomes to individual‐level psychological‐behavioural factors and individual differences. Accordingly, the most visible and harmful effects of psychologisation are in strategic HRM and the HRM‐performance literature but Troth and Guest's defence of psychology does not cover them. I use this response to re‐establish that it is psychologisation, not psychology per se, that is the critics' focal concern and describe how the three‐decade advance of psychologisation, along with scholastic scientism and normative promotionalism, have created severe theoretical and empirical problems in the high‐performance research programme and taken the strategic HRM field down a 30‐year dead‐end. Suggestions for a turn‐around are provided.
This article critiques organisational behaviour (OB) research on employee voice and presents a broader‐based conceptual model that integrates ideas and concepts across employment relationship ...disciplines and levels of analysis. OB studies err by taking an overly individualistic, psychological, managerialist and de‐institutionalised perspective on employee voice. This criticism is documented and illustrated with numerous examples from the OB literature. To provide a constructive step forward, the article presents an enlarged model of employee voice that not only includes OB but also brings in important contributions from the HRM, industrial relations, labour economics and labour process fields. The model provides an integrative framework for theoretical and empirical studies of voice and yields a number of research and practice implications.
This article introduces the symposium topic and five papers and their authors. The paradox is pointed out that management academics have for the last twenty years written hundreds of articles ...analyzing the causes of and remedies for the ‘separate worlds’ chasm that separates the academic and practitioner communities but almost never reach out to the practitioner side to learn their perspective and ideas on the problem. This behavioral asymmetry is attributed to the penchant of academics to view themselves as higher-positioned scientist-scholars who talk at and talk down to practitioners rather than talk with them.
•Practitioner perspective on the academic-practitioner gap, summary of symposium papers
In this paper I look at the last three decades of predominantly American research literature on strategic human resource management from three dimensions: (1) development of theory with predictive ...accuracy and robust conclusions, (2) production of actionable and value-added managerial principles, and (3) accurate portrayal of the historical origins and development of this area of management scholarship and practice. After an extensive reading of the literature, I conclude that strategic human resource management researchers as a group deserve a D to F grade on all three dimensions. Among the problems are an overreliance on knowledge areas and perspectives pertaining to the internal dimension of organizations and management (e.g., strategy, psychology, and organizational behavior) and too little attention paid to those areas and perspectives dealing with the external dimension (e.g., economics, industrial/employment relations, and the macro side of sociology). I suggest an economics-based framework as a possible way forward; a less normative-driven research program would also be helpful.
A proposition in the HRM literature is that to survive intensifying competition firms need to more effectively use their human capital by implementing high-performance work practices (HPWPs). This ...proposition is anchored on both extensive empirical evidence of a positive HPWP effect on performance and a theoretical model which incorporates ideas from strategy, RBV, AMO, behavioral, human capital, and organizational capability perspectives. This paper argues that on deeper examination both empirical and theoretical arguments have significant flaws and weaknesses which undercut the ‘more competition→more HPWPs→higher firm performance’ proposition. Indeed, using an alternative economics-based model the paper concludes the likely effect of intensified competition is, on balance, the opposite of the standard model; that is, more competition leads to less HPWPs. The model also demonstrates why the positive HPWP effect found in empirical studies is likely upward biased and more association than causation. The paper reconciles a number of empirical anomalies, such as why high-performance work systems are not more widely adopted, and explains why the conventional advice given to managers – invest in more HPWPs – needs revision.
•An in-depth critique of the HRM–performance paradigm.•Formulation of an alternative economics-based model.•Many new implications and hypotheses concerning HRM and performance.
This paper advances theory development in international and comparative HRM regarding convergence–divergence trends in HRM systems and practices across nations. Shortcomings in existing theory, such ...as universal versus contextual paradigms, are identified and critiqued, as are ambiguities in existing definitions and measures of HRM convergence and divergence. The paper then presents new ways of defining and measuring HRM convergence–divergence and a new theory perspective for explaining and predicting these trends. The new theory perspective involves incorporating economic principles of international trade and economic geography to explain the effect of global competition on the cross-national pattern of industry, firm, and production location and consequent patterns in HRM practice. On balance, economic theory predicts globalization likely leads to HRM divergence over time.
•New measures of HRM convergence–divergence are developed using frequency distributions of HRM practices.•HRM convergence–divergence trends are explained using economic theories from international trade and economic geography.•Economic theories predict globalization mostly likely leads to growing divergence in HRM practices across nations.
This paper surveys the development of the American human resource management field from the late 19th century to the start of the 21st century. Important people, ideas and events are identified as ...are contributing fields of study and schools of thought. Interesting and sometimes revisionist insights emerge, partly because human resource management is defined broadly to include industrial relations and personnel economics. The historical analysis is also used to derive implications for improving the current-day HRM research program.
The resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm is a guiding paradigm for strategic HRM research. This article explores the RBV–strategic HRM intersection, identifies and critiques RBV weaknesses and ...problem areas, develops new implications for RBV–strategic HRM theory and empirical work, and develops an alternative economics‐based decision model for making HRM choices. The article focuses on four RBV–strategic HRM dimensions: HRM performance and the ‘no rules for riches’ proposition; alternative definitions of value and competitive advantage and implications for strategic HRM's dependent variable; neglect of marginal decision rules and consequent misprediction of optimal HRM adoption; and the impact on employee relations of RBV‐guided rent‐capture practices. Numerous implications for theory and practice are developed; also suggested is a new paradigm approach for strategic HRM theory.
