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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.

Research in strategic human resource management (HRM) has focused mainly on the effects of HRM practices or systems on organizational effectiveness. However, institutional theory argues that besides being financially successful, organizations also need legitimacy to survive. Owing to the tension between competitive and institutional pressures, organizations balance between the degree of conformity and the degree of differentiation from competitors regarding HRM. The purpose of this paper is to address how institutional pressures help shape HRM.

Using the concepts of leeway, human agency and strategic choice, differences in three types of institutional fit are highlighted: innovative, conformist and deviant. A comparative case study approach is used in order to illustrate the framework, using document analysis and 43 interviews in three organizations in The Netherlands.

This paper shows how balancing competitive and institutional pressures in organizations affects HRM. The cases illustrate the proposed theoretical framework, showing leeway, human agency, strategic choice and the nature of institutional fit. The organizations each illustrate a type of institutional fit. Moreover, not the institutional context itself, but the organization's response seems to make a difference for the nature of institutional fit.

While previous studies focus on the effects of HRM on organizational effectiveness, this paper examines how the balance between competitive and institutional pressures affects HRM and aims to show that institutional fit can contribute to strategic HRM by providing insight in this more balanced goal setting of organizations.

This paper aims to present an empirical study of the effect of high performance work practices on commitment and citizenship behaviour in the health care sector. The theory suggests that individual employees are willing “to go the extra mile” when they are given the opportunity to develop their abilities and to participate, and when they are motivated.

The data were gathered in a Dutch general hospital using employee questionnaires. Medical specialists were not included in the study.

The results of the study suggest that employee development (e.g. skills training, general training, and task enrichment) and employee involvement (e.g. job autonomy, participation in decision making) are important HR practices in creating a high performance work climate in a health care organisation.

The data come from one hospital and the analysis is cross‐sectional. However, the importance of the study lies in its focus on the individual employee perspective rather than the organisational level analyses which currently predominate in the HRM and performance debate.

The training and development of health care employees can increase their affective commitment. Increasing employee involvement can also help stimulate citizenship behaviour.

The paper looks at the non‐profit sector, whereas the majority of previous HR research has focused on multinational companies.

To provide an overview of recent empirical survey research on human resource competencies in Europe.

The survey data were collected in 2002 in the global human resource competence study (HRCS), an initiative of the University of Michigan. The study was processed online (web‐based). The respondents of the European HRCS, the main focus of our empirical analysis in this paper, were HR professionals and line managers of multinational companies located in Europe.

The results suggest that personal credibility and HR delivery have a positive effect on the relative ranking of the HR function and its professionals. According to non‐HR respondents strategic contribution is the competency that will lead to financial competitiveness, while HR managers consider business knowledge to be crucial for added value of the HR function.

First, the data are cross‐sectional and one should therefore be very careful in assuming certain causal relationships between domains and performance. Second, the analyses are built on perception data. Finally, the inclusion of more control variables like “size of the organisation” was limited as a result of missing data.

The approach demonstrates how competencies of the HR function (e.g. HR delivery, personal credibility, strategic contribution) can contribute to a stronger position of the HR function within an organization and to agility and long‐term viability of an organization (sustainability).

This paper gives an overview of the literature on HR roles and introduces the HR competency perspective for strengthening the position of the HR function and the added value of the HR function to the organization's sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of management practices – specifically, high‐performance work practices (HPWPs) – on employee burnout. Two potential mediating mechanisms that counterbalance each other in the development of burnout are compared: a critical mechanism that states that HPWPs intensify job demands (which increases burnout) and a positive mechanism that states that HPWPs increase fairness among employees (which reduces burnout).

Questionnaire data are gathered among 393 employees working in 86 Dutch organizations. Human resource managers provide information about HPWPs while employees were inquired about their perceptions of job demands, fairness, and burnout. Multilevel regression analyses were conducted to test the assumptions.

The analyses reveal a slightly positive relationship between HPWPs and burnout, which is completely mediated by job demands. Fairness was associated with the experience of less burnout, but the results do not sustain the idea that HPWPs contributed to procedural justice. Although the data do not support the idea that justice and intensified job demands counteract each other in the development of burnout under systems of HPWPs, the results do support a critical “employee exploitation” oriented perspective on HPWPs.

Most studies on HPWPs focus on mechanisms that explain positive employee well‐being outcomes. A more critical perspective, which predicts increased employee strain as a result of demanding work practices, is also valid. The results of this paper indicate that the critical perspective on HPWPs receives empirical justification and requires further elaboration in future research.

There is a growing interest in theory and in practice with regard to the relationship between human resource management (HRM) and total quality management (TQM), as well as the relationship between these two perspectives and business performance. Empirical research suggests significant effects of HRM/TQM on the performances of an organisation. The majority of research in this area is focused on the effects of HRM/TQM at the organisational level. Research on the perceptions of individual employees might obtain new insights for further discussion on the effectiveness of HRM/TQM in an organisation. The authors had the opportunity to analyse a relatively large database with recent data of individual employee perceptions from a knowledge‐intensive organisation in The Netherlands. This analysis gives new insight into concepts such as “co‐operation”, “information”, “leadership”, “salary”, “work conditions”, and “goal setting” in relation to employee satisfaction and the intention to leave the organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a national policy on sickness absence management is translated by HR managers into local human resource management (HRM) practices by developing and applying an analytical framework with three dimensions: individual preferences, strategic reframing, and local grounding.

The paper is based on policy documents and interviews with HR managers in Dutch law firms. The theoretical scope is the debate on HRM and institutional contexts.

The paper uncovers a variety of individual preferences among HR managers' interpretations of the national policy. However, in strategically reframing the policy, the organizations act upon it from a mainly “managerialist” perspective: they focus on reducing absence through increased control of employees, rather than reforming organizational practices that may adversely affect the health of workers. The local groundings reinforce unequal power relations between different categories of employees: HR managers/line managers; professionals/administrative personnel; men/women. The paper contributes to the understanding of how changes in institutional contexts are translated into organizations and the role of HR managers within this process.

The paper explores the translation process in a particular setting. It would be fruitful to broaden the scope to other institutional contexts and organizations and to include a diverse range of actors to develop additional knowledge of the interaction in the translation process.

The paper develops both empirical and theoretical conclusions on the translation, that is, the sense making of HRM in an uncertain environment of changing national institutions.

Focuses on the analysis of empirical data on customer satisfaction and the relationship with hard organisational performance data. The organisation is a Flexcompany with its headquarters in The Netherlands, but also operating in other countries in Europe. The empirical data on customer satisfaction and business performance stem from 1998 and 1999, from which it can be concluded that it is possible to find evidence for the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between customer satisfaction and organisational performance indicators, although the relationship is not very strong. Various factors might influence the time‐lag between a change in customer satisfaction and an expected effect on sales margin, or other output indicators. However, the analyses provide answers to questions related to the quality dimensions as underlying factors behind the items in the customer satisfaction questionnaire. Also, there are some indications for the relation between customer satisfaction and changing behaviour of customers.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether the use of numerical and functional flexibility practices in firms affect their performance.

A combined employer/employee Norwegian data set is used to estimate production function like equations. The data stem from a questionnaire among Norwegian work organizations conducted in 2003 and are supplemented by register data from Statistics Norway about the organizations and their employees.

Numerical flexibility measures are negatively associated with wages and productivity per employee, although the association is stronger with wages than with productivity. This supports the idea that numerical flexibility fits with a low‐cost strategy. It is also found that a negative association between functional flexibility and wages and productivity per employee, with the association once again stronger with wages than with productivity, contrary to the hypothesis. The idea that high‐commitment human resource (HR) management has positive effects on wages and productivity was confirmed by other indicators of HR management.

The paper is limited by a cross‐sectional design and its relatively simple indicators of numerical and functional flexibility, which only show whether certain practices are used, rather than the intensity of their use.

This is one of the first studies that tests the effects of both numerical and functional flexible work practices on wages and productivity in a regulated labour market.