HRM and Performance: Achieving Long Term Viability

HRM policies and practices need to cope with the dual responsibilities of providing a firm with the best employees to deliver improved financial performance, and a moral duty to these employees to provide a working environment that is equitable and encourages personal development. Many writers have emphasized the connection between sophisticated HRM techniques and financial competitiveness, but has this been at the expense of concepts such as fairness and legitimacy? This book adopts a broader perspective that takes into account not only the strategic dimension of HRM, but also the professional and societal dimension. It begins by examining the interaction of HRM, strategy, and performance, before putting this into an institutional context, where it is argued that successful HRM practice will be unique for each context in which it operates. It then develops a contextually-based human resource theory, able to examine and analyse HRM at an organizational, industry, national, and international level. This theory is applied to a number of cases of leading firms in both the USA and Europe. The book concludes by combining the empirical evidence of the case studies with the theoretical work of earlier chapters to develop a practical approach linking the different roles of HR to specific aspects of performance and developing a 4logic scorecard, which does full justice to the essence of HRM. Combining academic research with a focus on practical conclusions and recommendations, HRM and Performance will be challenging and innovative reading for all involved in HRM: Academics, Researchers, MBA and graduate students, practitioners and consultants.

Table of Contents:
1: Introduction 2: HRM and Strategy: Does it Matter? 3: Human Resource Management in its Context: An Institutional Approach 4: A Multidimensional Perspective on Performance 5: The Contextually-Based Human Resource Theory 6: The Contextually-Based Human Resource Theory in Practice 7: Contrasting Metal and IT Sectors: Internal Versus External Regulation of Flexibility 8: Continuing Divergence of HRM Practices: The Case of the United States and the Netherlands 9: Changing HR Roles: Towards a Real Balanced HRM Scorecard Epilogue

About the Author :
Jaap Paauwe is Professor of Business and Organization at the Rotterdam School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has written and co-authored eleven books, and published numerous papers, on HRM, industrial relations, and organizational change. He has acted as guest editor for the International Journal of HRM, and the Human Resource Management Journal, and, along with colleagues from other Dutch universities, initiated the Dutch HRM Network.

Review :
`Paauwe's pathbreaking book, HRM and Performance should be requisite reading for anyone interested in HRM, academics and practitioners alike... I learned a great deal from this excellent book and it deserves to become a classic HRM text, challenging US orthodoxies.' Karen Legge, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Warwick Business School `Professor Paauwe skillfully builds on previous theory and evidence, new case study work, and his own long experience in the field, to fashion a unique theory of HRM and a new set of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of HRM in practice. His book should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the practice or study of HRM.' Barry Gerhart, Professor of Management and Human Resources, The University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business `Professor Paauwe starts with a simple premise: It's high time HR scholars in various countries and from various perspectives began talking with rather than around each other. To foster this dialogue, he crafts a contextually based human resource theory woven, in a remarkably comprehensive and integrative fashion, from threads of richly diverse literatures. Then, to drive the point home, he puts the theory to work, illustrating in refreshingly clear terms how it can and should be used to enhance both the study and practice of HR in the years to come. The result is a real paradigm-buster... ' Lee Dyer, Professor of Human Resource Studies, Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, ILR School, Cornell University `This is a welcome book that challenges many of the dominant assumptions in the burgeoning literature on HRM and performance... in seeking to break out of the shackles of [the] dominant paradigm, Paauwe has provided a highly challenging and deeply rewarding and distinctive approach to the complex subject of HRM and performance.' David Guest