There is a widespread recognition of the fact that organizations need to continuously enhance their capabilities to be able to retain a competitive edge in a highly complex business environment. One ...of the mechanisms available to them is an intercorporate learning network. This paper reports on the way a learning network— National Petroleum Management Programme (NPMP)— was set up and institutionalized to address the strategic needs of the petroleum industry in India. It focuses on the external and internal drivers for change and describes the key challenges encountered in translating change. It also demonstrates the advantage of collaboration between oil and gas companies as a strategy to deal with competitive times.
The objectives of setting up NPMP was to:
develop among the enterprises a shared understanding on the strategic advantage of collaboration in the competitive environment to help the industry in meeting its objectives of growth and vitality
act as a catalytic agent for initiating macro level changes in the policies and practices in petroleum enterprises
provide a range of learning opportunities and services.
The dynamics of the Network provide a critical lens for analysing how change is impacted and dealt with in the petroleum industry in India. The author addresses some of the management issues involved in the process. The challenges include:
motivating members to participate on a joint cost-sharing basis
building upon and dissemination of new knowledge
translating change through the Learning Network.
Finally, the author points out the implications for HR professionals and suggests what new skills and competencies they need to develop for managing change.
The aim of this paper is to report on current developments in the area of human resource management (HRM) in Australia. The study analyses 1372 on‐line responses to a survey of Australian Human ...Resources Institute (AHRI) members. Results of the research indicate that although human resources (HR) has strengthened its strategic positioning, HR professionals face several challenges including: the potential narrowing of their career base; the need for improved HRM metrics; and a broader commitment to attraction and retention initiatives. Results also reveal that expectations of a more strategic business focus for HR are developing in the context of an industrial relations climate that has increased HR's responsibility for employee relations in the workplace. In the face of these complex expectations, Australian HR professionals report positive reactions to the changes that have occurred within the HR function; they remain optimistic about their future and their capacity to manage the shifting ground that HRM occupies.
Although a ‘new generation’ of HR professionals in Australia have proclaimed that they are engaged in more ‘strategic’ issues of management than their predecessors, there are a number of emerging ...problems in the workplace and organisations which need to be addressed. Australian HR professionals need to be engaged in developing a new ‘social contract’ which includes greater attention to work and family issues, investment in skills development to build a ‘knowledge economy’ and new retirement policies at the national level to provide adequate incomes for the ‘greying generation’ of Australians. This requires HR professionals to broaden the agenda of issues in which they are engaged.
The impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) pandemic is unprecedented. At an organisational level, the crisis has been hugely disruptive, complex and fraught with ambiguity for leaders. The ...crisis is fundamentally a human one, making human resource (HR) leaders central in enabling organisations to manage through and ultimately exit the crisis successfully. We apply a paradox lens to understand the HR leadership challenges posed by the COVID‐19 crisis. We argue that how the HR function responds to the challenges of the crisis and its role in mapping the exit route from the crisis are likely to shape the trajectory of the function for decades to come. The pandemic creates an unprecedented opportunity to elevate the status of the HR function in organisations where it has struggled to gain status and to reinforce the influence of the function in those where it already enjoys legitimacy. The value of this is likely to be reflected in more sustainable performance through the alignment of people and purpose and balancing the short and long term objectives of the organisation.
The development of HR analytics, the growing dominance of positivistic approaches in academic HRM, and the increasing influence of evidence‐based approaches on HR represent a convergence of ...contextual factors that have the potential to influence HR practice significantly. In this context, we examine how the HR analytics “project” may unfold base on a reflective analysis of a number of data‐rich well‐being projects and empirical evaluations. We focus on the ways in which participants may become enrolled and mobilised in such projects and the implications this has for perceived value and effects of “data” generated by HR analytics. In particular, we draw attention to the social, political, and onto‐epistemological processes of the analytics project and draw conclusions about the way in which the analytics project may influence professional practice.
This article reports on a participant ethnography of a people analytics (PA) team operating within the human resources (HR) function of a European multinational corporation at the cutting edge of PA ...development. Despite their analytical expertise, this team experienced significant dissonance between their desired image of PA work and the actualities of PA practice. Our analysis explains this dissonance through two prevalent identity performance scripts: ‘customerization’ and ‘action‐orientation’. Taken together these scripts were identified as having a restrictive impact on the production of more scientifically rigorous PA work. Further, both of these scripts were found to be imbued with cynicism, whereby PA practitioners distance themselves from the commercial presentation of their work outputs. The article reveals how management preferencing of presentational and commercial considerations over those of scientific rigour may result in a failure to generate the level of organisational benefits promoted by the optimistic accounts in current literature, with negative implications for the reputational profile of PA.
If you are interested in people as a subject, even if you are interested in them only as an aspect of the effective managing of organisations, you are likely to be more aware of the impact of your ...actions and reactions on others, and therefore more likely to be civil. But perhaps we still need to keep the issue of civility in our minds as we write our papers and our emails, review others' work and aim to develop a new generation of researchers.
Key points
We know that civility matters, but it has to be tempered with our ability to continue to engage critically with fellow scholars.
Criticism has two meanings: one involving attacks on the motivation or character of the individual concerned and the other involving analytical deconstruction of individual's work.
Given how much of ourselves we put into academic work, we need to be extra careful to disentangle the two forms of criticism.
Human resource management scholars are.
Technological developments are on the rise and considered to make way to a fourth industrial revolution. However, the extent to which (future) human resource (HR) professionals feel prepared to ...translate what technological developments mean for organizations and work remains largely unclear. In this article, we explore how higher human resource management (HRM) education prepares future HR professionals for the influence of technological developments in organizations. In addition, we investigate how alumni feel prepared by these programs to translate the impact of technological developments to their organization, by looking at the context of Dutch higher HRM education programs and deploying a qualitative case study methodology. Findings indicate that HR professionals face changes in their role, which require enrichments of their knowledge and competencies in the areas of technology change management, data literary and ethics, and (line) management involvement in the implementation of technology related practices. Furthermore, results show that HR programs integrate the subject of technological developments in different degrees of depth and that there is room for (strategic) development. Practical implications focusing on how higher HRM education programs could integrate knowledge and competencies that arise from these developments to increase the strategic value of HR professionals are discussed.
•Technological developments influence HR work. HR prfessionals play an important role in managing these developments.•HRM education should address technology-related change management, data literacy and ethics, and multidisciplinary collaboration.•HRM education should be in close contact with HRM professionals to prepare future HR professionals when technological developments are involved.•HRM education plays an important role in keeping current HR professionals up-to-date through continuous education.
The implementation of human resource (HR) policies often proves troublesome due to the appearance, and stubborn persistence, of gaps in the process. Human resource management (HRM) scholars ...problematise these gaps and advocate tight implementation to reduce gaps and to ensure the desired impact of policies on organisational performance. Drawing on organisational institutionalism, we contend that gaps in implementing HR policies can actually be productive, as they secure organisational legitimacy, and thus enable organisations to operate viably within several institutional environments. We suggest that different approaches to implementation are needed, some of them premised on accepting sustained implementation gaps. We introduce minimum and moderate implementation approaches, rooted in the notion of decoupling, to complement approaches aimed at tight implementation. Our aim is to support the further development of research based on a richer interpretation of HRM implementation challenges and choices they present for HR managers.
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