Background of HRM = Before we go to Warwick

HRM is a body of knowledge and an assortment of practices to do with the organization of work and the management of employment relations.

The mainstream literature identifies three major subdomains of knowledge: micro, strategic and international.

The largest subdomain refers to micro HRM (MHRM), which is concerned with managing individual employees and small work groups. It covers areas such as HR planning, job design, recruitment and selection, performance management, training and development, and rewards. These HR sub functions cover a myriad of evidence-based practices, training techniques and payment systems, for instance, many of them informed by psychology-oriented studies of work /

The second domain is strategic HRM (SHRM), which concerns itself with the processes of linking HR strategies with business strategies and measures the effects on organizational performance.

The third domain is international HRM (IHRM), which focuses on the management of people in companies operating in more than one country.

Drawing on the work of Squires (2001), these three major sub domains help us address three basic questions:

What do HRM professionals do?

What affects what they do?

How do they do what they do?

To help us answer the first question, the key MHRM subf unctions of HR policies, programmes and practices that have been designed in response to organizational goals and contingencies, and have been managed to achieve those goals. Each function contains alternatives from which managers can choose. How the HR function is organized and how much power it has relative to that of other management functions is affected by both external and internal factors unique to the establishment.

SHRM underscores the need for the HR strategy to be integrated with other management functions, and highlights the responsibility of line management to foster the high commitment and motivation associated with high-performing work systems. SHRM is also concerned with managing sustainability, including, for example, establishing a low carbon work system and organization, communicating this vision, setting clear expectations for creating a sustainable workplace, and developing the capability to reorganize people and reallocate other resources to achieve the vision. As part of the integrative process, all managers are expected to better comprehend the strategic nature of best or better HR practices, to execute them more skilfully, and at the same time to intervene to affect the mental models, attitudes and behaviours needed, for instance, to build a high performing sustainable culture.

what affects what managers and HR professional do? The HR activities that managers perform vary from one workplace to another depending upon the contingencies affecting the organization. These contingencies can be divided into three broad categories: external context, strategy and organization. The external category reinforces the notion that organizations and society are part of the same set of processes that organizations are embedded within a particular market society that encompasses the economic and cultural aspects. The external variables frame the context for formulating competitive strategies . The internal organizational contingencies include size, work, structure and technology . Global as well as local factors can affect what managers do.

For those managers in companies that cross national boundaries, micro HR policies and practices relating to global and local recruitment and selection, training and development, rewards and the management of expatriates will be affected by a particular countrys institutional structure and cultural setting. These micro HR functions, when integrated with different macro contexts and overall strategy considerations, define the sub domain of IHRM

The third of our three basic questions how do managers and HR professionals do what they do? requires us to discuss the means or skills by which managers accomplish their HRM goals. Managers and HR specialists use technical, cognitive and interpersonal such as mentoring and coaching processes and skills to accomplish their managerial work. Managing people is complex, and individual managers vary in terms of their capacity or inclination to use established processes and skills. These processes and skills therefore concern human relationships and go some way to explaining different management styles and the distinction between a manager and a leader.

The micro, strategic and international domains, the contingencies influencing domestic and international HR policies and practices, and managerial skills are combined are given by different models.

The HRM models give the following

Provides an analytical framework for studying the above features of HRM

Legitimates certain practices of HRM ( means legalises or standardises)

Provide description of HRM by establishing variables and their relationships to be researched

Is a heuristic device (heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical methodology not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals)

One of which is Warwick Model explained below

The Warwick model emanated from the Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change at the University of Warwick, UK, and with two particular researchers: Hendry and Pettigrew (1990). The Warwick framework extends the Harvard model by drawing on its analytical aspects.

The model takes account of business strategy and HR practices, the external and internal context in which these activities take place and the processes by which such changes take place, including interactions between changes in both context and content.

The strength of the model is that it identifies and classifies important environmental influences on HRM. It maps the connections between the outer (wider environment) and the inner (organizational) contexts, and explores how HRM adapts to changes in context.

The implication is that those organizations achieving an alignment between the external and internal contexts will experience superior performance.

A weakness of the model is that the process whereby internal HR practices are linked to business output or performance is not developed.

The five elements of the model are as follows:

1 Outer context socioeconomic, technical, political-legal,competitive

2 Inner context culture, structure, leadership, task-technology, business outputs

3 Business strategy content objectives, product market, strategy and tactics

4 HRM context role, definition, organization, HR outputs

5 HRM content HR flows, work systems, reward systems, employee relations.

Strengths

Weaknesses...

Maps the connection between inner and outer contexts

Internal HR practices links with business outputs and performance are not developed

Adapts to changes in context

Emergent strategy can be anarchical

Emergent business strategy

Organisational learning

Alignment of internal and external contexts for success