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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the commitment‐ and control‐approaches on the use of competency management, and to investigate whether attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control mediate these effects.

In Study 1, using a survey, employees indicated whether their organization adopted a commitment‐ or a control‐approach towards competency management. Moreover, they rated their own attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, and behaviour. In Study 2 a scenario experiment was conducted in which the authors manipulated the commitment‐ and control‐approaches towards competency management in order to establish causal relations.

Results consistently showed that the use of competency management is higher within a commitment‐ than within a control‐approach. Furthermore, attitude and perceived behavioural control were found to mediate the relationship between the commitment‐approach and the use of competency management.

Future research should include other organizational members, for example (line) managers, to create future insight in the effects of commitment‐ and control‐approaches on the use of competency management.

The results of the studies highlight that a commitment‐oriented approach increases the use of competency management by employees and that a positive employee attitude and perceived behavioural control are of considerable importance when increasing the use of competency management is an organization's primary goal.

The paper gives insight in how to persuade and stimulate employees to use competency management more frequently.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the human resource management (HRM) literature that builds up to our current concern with dualities, paradoxes, ambiguities, and balance issues; and to introduce the six papers in this special issue on managing the dualities in HRM.

The paper presents a literature review taking a historical look at the development of the HR field up to the present awareness of the complexity of the concept and practice of HRM.

Almost 30 years on, is being found now increasing evidence of the dualities, paradoxes, and ambiguities entailed in HRM.

The literature review starts with the personnel management (PM)‐HRM and industrial relations‐HRM debates in the 1980s. Earlier work on traditional PM is not debated in this paper.

After reading this general review practitioners might gain more insights in the potential tensions, ambiguities, and conflicts of interest that are characteristic for the field of HRM in practice.

First, this paper highlights the interest of the pluralist perspective in contrast to the dominating unitarist approaches in contemporary human resource studies. Second, this overview presents methodological challenges for example, with regard to multi‐level and multi‐actor research. Finally, the paper presents alternative theories for future research including new institutionalism, strategic balance theory, and health psychology theories.

This study aims to “bridge” two streams of HRM research: organisation level research on HRM and performance and individual level research on employee work perceptions and behavioural performance. This study seeks to analyse the value of organisation level HRM practices for individual level employees' assessment of the degree of violation of their psychological contracts. It also aims to examine the contribution of commitment HRM practices and traditional HRM practices in explaining perceptions of psychological contract violation.

Based on a sample of 49 organisations with 2,099 individual respondents, the paper analyses the relationship between organisation level HRM practices and individual level employees' assessment of the degree of violation of their psychological contracts, using multi‐level analysis.

The findings show a clear positive influence of a number of HRM practices. More use of HRM practices leads to lower levels of perceived psychological contract violation for individual employees, regardless of individual characteristics. Commitment HRM practices explain about half of the variance in psychological contract violation that is due to the total amount of HRM practices.

A limitation of the study is its cross‐sectional design and the measure of HRM practices, indicating more or less explicit attention for HRM in an organization, but not possible substitutable and synergetic effects between various HRM practices. Further research should therefore explore the effect of combinations of HRM practices. Findings however do indicate the relevance of organization level HRM for individual level perceptions of the employment relationship.

It is in the interest of managers to have a clear knowledge of which organisational activities will elicit those attitudes and behaviours necessary to achieve organisational goals. These findings highlight the importance of HRM practices to contribute to employees' realistic assessment of the mutual demands of their employment relationship with their organization. The more HRM practices the better in terms of employees' psychological contract violation. Furthermore, the findings show the importance of commitment HRM practices, but also the remaining relevance of more traditional practices.

This study combines insights on organisation level HRM with insights on individual level psychological contracts. Although the necessity of using multi‐level analysis in these kinds of studies has been argued by various researchers, this study is one of the first to use this analytical technique, thus genuinely showing the impact of organizational level HRM practices on individual level HR outcomes (in this case the psychological contract).