The Realities of Human Resource Management: Managing the Employment Relationship

Citation

Hyman, J. (2001), "The Realities of Human Resource Management: Managing the Employment Relationship", Employee Relations, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 207-214. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2001.23.2.207.3

Developed from their earlier 1993 volume, in the present book the two authors have drawn upon academic principles of empirical based enquiry and critical review to encourage managers (and potential managers) to adopt more strategic and less pragmatic approaches to the management of people in employing organisations. The authors argue that much of the existing HR literature, or at least those elements which are directed towards practitioners, tends to be prescriptive and lacking in empirical foundations. A second key feature is that the authors, by implication at least, posit that the hitherto distinctive fields of personnel and industrial relations can now be integrated into a single text. A third feature is that the authors directly confront managers themselves, especially at senior levels, as constituting the major barrier to preventing change in more strategic directions for HR.

The intended readership of the volume is wide, embracing corporate managers of all disciplines as well as specialist HR practitioners and owner‐managers of SMEs. Undergraduate as well as post‐graduate (business and management) students are included within its range. So the ambitions for the book, which covers only 250 pages, in terms of scale of subject coverage and breadth of potential readership are substantial. To what extent do the contents of the book reflect the claims put for them?

Of course, there have been a number of research‐focused and critical texts on HRM (the Macmillan Management, Work and Organisations series, which includes volumes by Legge, Blyton and Turnbull, Winstanley and Woodall are also personnel focussed and aimed at a broad management audience) so it is rather an exaggeration to claim that “the great bulk of material … on human resource management” is “highly prescriptive”, proffering “universal” solutions to personnel dilemmas (p. xi). These claims are mitigated somewhat as these deficient materials are those “which managers and students of management are likely to come across”, which suggests somewhat limited exposure by managers to the less comforting world of critical management.

Notwithstanding the hyperbole, there is much that is good about the book that will appeal to a broad managerial audience, even if the central message to them is not a positive one. This message is oft‐repeated and crucial: that too much of management action in employee relations and HRM is undertaken reactively and with insufficient strategic thought. Evidence of lack of strategy is presented functionally with respect to training and development, payment systems (with an especially and healthily sceptical review of performance‐related pay), recruitment and selection, and employee representation. Within senior management circles, the authors contend that contributions of HR to corporate decision making are similarly constrained by short‐termism and “ad hocery”. Faced with these deficiencies, the book presents an early chapter on “Managing (people) strategically”. The problem is, of course, that vital as it is, strategic management covers a vast and highly complex area and the chapter is forced to take the somewhat reductionist approach of briefly presenting a range of models (along with their equally complex modelling diagrams) as well as snapshots of manifestations of strategic behaviour. The richness of UK industrial relations is compressed into little more than a chapter with a corresponding loss of conceptual and contextual detail. Whether this level and depth of analysis is sufficient to move managers to seriously question their existing and hitherto intransigent non‐strategic behaviour or to push personnel specialists more centrally into the strategic arena is debatable.

Probably the most convincing chapters deal with the twin resourcing issues of training and development and recruitment and selection. In both cases, the authors are able to bring to bear a wide range of research data to support their thesis of non‐strategic management behaviour. I was less convinced by the conclusions from the (minefield) chapter on involvement and participation that involvement and participation “work”. There is a considerable body of research literature that is at least agnostic on this issue and a number of publications which indicate serious limitations on the potential of involvement to systematically influence employee behaviour. Indeed, the use of PRP, rightly criticised in this volume, has been presented by some commentators as a form of employee involvement.

In conclusion, the book has much to commend it for managers and advanced students. It is meticulously researched and the arguments substantiated by plentiful references to contemporary empirically grounded findings. The authors write with considerable authority in boiling down the extensive subject area into a genuinely manageable text. Yet I do have misgivings: the impression that I received was one of too much detachment, a book where people are treated unequivocally as “human resources”. We have moved substantially from the days of personnel acting as the “guardian of the corporate conscience” but to present human issues uniquely in terms of the potential strategic contribution of people to business endeavour adds a dryness to the text and in addition risks the neglect of real issues which may influence individual and corporate behaviour. For example, there is very little discussion about the major topics of work‐life balance or of the reasons why managerial behaviour can be obstructive in these and other areas of potential tension between employee and corporate objectives. “This book is about managing employee relations” state the authors: in this it succeeds, but I would have liked to see something more about employment relationships.