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The purpose of this paper is to consider how talent management can be a strategic lever to enable the development of a customer-centric culture in the hospitality sector.

In-depth interviews with HR practitioners within the hospitality industry have been used to explore different approaches to talent management.

Changing customer requirements necessitate increased emphasis on customer experience demanding a more skilled workforce, especially stronger in interpersonal skills. Companies are adjusting their attraction, retention and development strategies to deliver a revised understanding of talent. They are focusing on building that capability rather than buying it in. Leadership selection and development is also being adjusted.

This approach has implications for the skill demands placed on the workforce, for the sort of staff who are hired (chosen on attitude more than technical skills) and how they are trained, assessed and rewarded. Leaders (at all levels) must adjust their style to suit and work in partnership with HR.

The paper offers the chance for hospitality sector leaders to reflect on how they manage talent, giving them ways to link people management with the drivers of business success. It shows how organisations can meet the challenges of the “experience economy” through attracting and developing the right staff and how talent management policy and practice can be used as a vehicle for culture change and development.

This chapter seeks to optimize HR shared services performance by highlighting the potential for service fragmentation that can arise out of in the so-called Ulrich (structure or service delivery) model.

The evidence used in this chapter principally comes from the author’s own work, especially research for the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), and draws upon academic literature where possible.

This chapter argues that HR directors should guard against three sets of fragmentation risks. Firstly, HR shared services should be properly connected to the rest of HR to offer customers an integrated service to avoid the structure’s division of labor inducing incoherence. Second, to guard against this risk, HR directors should exercise care in outsourcing/offshoring beyond individual, discrete services because contractually or spatially separating services risks exacerbating this tendency to fragmentation. Outsourcing/offshoring may focus too much on cost savings and insufficiently on quality. So, third, HR should argue for the distinctiveness of its activities and fight commoditization that is also implied in the creation of cross-functional shared service centers.

The arguments in this chapter could be better supported by academic research. In-depth case studies of management decision making and shared services operation would help support or challenge the chapter’s conclusion, as could quantitative evidence on the benefits/disbenefits of outsourcing/offshoring/cross-functional shared services centers.

We have highlighted a number of reported problems with HR shared services operation, besides the three principal risks noted above, but we have suggested possible solutions that could be adopted by practitioners.

HR managers may find this chapter helpful in designing new HR structures or in assessing the effectiveness of shared services that goes beyond the typical key performance indicator measures.

Partnerships with business involvement became a key trend in development cooperation since the late 1980s. Partnerships emerged as promising governance mechanism; however, governing partnerships in practice remained challenging – promise and reality seem to diverge. This chapter scrutinizes the tension between the promises of partnerships as governance arrangements and their actual governance challenges. It disentangles the complexity of governing partnerships by developing a framework based on a continuum between efficiency- and participation-orientation. This chapter identifies partnering approaches and their governance orientations based on an extensive review of literature in diverse academic fields and grey literature on the emergence and evolution of partnerships in development cooperation since the 1980s. Examples from the Dutch development cooperation provide illustrations for each partnership approach. Efficiency- and participation-orientation highlight competing governance rationales, logics and partnership characteristics. Partnership approaches that aim to embrace both perspectives have to deal with the inherent governance paradox between control and collaboration. This chapter identifies three key implications for research and practice: exploring new governance approaches and practices, adapting development agencies towards partnering and coordinating partnership approaches at international level. Understanding the tension between the promises of partnerships as governance arrangements and their actual governance challenges does not only contribute to more nuanced conceptualizations of partnering approaches for development but has also implications on how to govern partnerships for development in practice.

The aim of this article is to argue that human resources (HR) should adjust the role it performs depending on its local environment – what is desirable and achievable.

The paper discusses the arguments for and against the arrival of a universal culture and whether there exists a best approach to HR management.

The paper suggests that HR should approach the drive to uniformity of HR policy and practice with caution, rather it should proceed on a case by case basis judging the costs and benefits of harmonization in the light of the particular policy and circumstances.

The paper makes suggestions as to how HR can adapt that can be applied in practice.

The paper expresses a desire for a more flexible, autonomous HR function.

The aim of this paper is to ask why western organisations appear to be moving towards a single global HR model that minimises cultural differences compared with Asian organisations that seem to allow more variation in HR policies and practices. Moreover, we try to identify the problems western organisations face in taking this route and how they seek to overcome them.

The paper is based on a case survey approach whereby the author (and colleague) researched the global HR practices of some 70 organisations, interviewing a good proportion of the senior HR managers in these organisations. The focus was on global employment brands, culture and diversity, as well as talent management and HR service delivery model.

Western organisations seem to be moving towards a single global HR model that minimises cultural differences, whereas “polycentric” organisational forms are common in Asian companies. This may be to do with ownership structure and business model, but is also through Western organisations fashioning a “one company” philosophy and reducing costs through centralisation. This approach risks the creation of an ethnocentric world view based on a home country perspective that might damage diversity and lead to the cloning of the business leadership. The paper offers some risk mitigation strategies based around having common people principles but allowing distinctive local practice.

The research is case study-based. There is no quantitative element to the results. Thus, the research has the benefit of in-depth understanding of organisational practice and its context, and the author (and colleague) do not have the benefit of testing the findings across a larger number of organisations. In particular, the East versus West distinction the author (and colleague) made needs further refinement. And, the author would want to look in more depth at the business structures of Western firms to see how much effect they have on organisational culture.

Organisations can take the findings, including solutions to the problems of ethnocentricity, and apply them to their own situations. In particular, it should encourage a more thoughtful review of the development of organisational culture and especially reflection on the dangers of standardisation and consolidation of HR services.

This paper is based on original case study research and uses these insights to consider some of the academic debates about organisational culture and HR services, specifically within the context of global operations. The advice to organisations will be new to practitioners, although it builds on previous work.

This paper aims to explore the obstacles to human resources (HR) making a strategic contribution and to share ways of overcoming those obstacles.

The paper uses case studies to demonstrate how organizations are successfully integrating people and business strategies.

This author argues that HR has found it difficult to effectively make a strategic contribution to the organizations it supports because it has not defined what form a strategic input should take, a lack of capability within the function and an absence of management support.

The paper explains how organizations can overcome these obstacles and gives examples of how two very different types have integrated business and people strategies, and measured functional impact.

This paper seeks to explore the reasons why many organisations do not evaluate the effectiveness of their reward policies and practices, examines the approaches used by those organizations which do evaluate, and develops a model of evidence‐based reward management which describes how evaluation can take place.

The paper draws on a study of why organisations do or do not evaluate reward and an examination of what organizations taking evaluation seriously were doing about it. The study was based on a survey of 173 reward and HR practitioners and 13 case studies.

The survey found that only 46 per cent of respondents carried out a full evaluation. Other surveys have established that an even lower proportion evaluated. Those organisations which evaluate reward do so because they recognise that it is necessary to obtain value for money from their considerable expenditure on pay. Those who do not evaluate offer a number of reasons, but the most important was lack of resources or time. It was established that while an evidence‐based approach was desirable there was no set pattern of conducting an evaluation.

Information about the evaluation practices of the case study organisations and the concept of evidence‐based reward management as an approach to evaluation provide guidance to practitioners on how they can measure the effectiveness of their reward policies and practices.

The paper extends the pioneering research of Corby et al. to develop new insights into the process of reward evaluation.