'Best practice' human resource management: perfect opportunity or dangerous illusion?

By M. Marchington, I. Grugulis. 2000

411 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years there has been a considerable degree of interest in the notion of 'best practice' HRM, inspired at least in part by the work of Jeffrey Pfeffer. Along with other contributions from the UK and the USA, this has resulted in assertions that a particular bundle of HR practices can increase profits irrespective of organizational, industrial, or national context. In this paper, we focus on the way in which HRM is characterized in these writings, querying whether the practices which are typically assumed and put forward as 'good' may not appear quite so beneficial to workers when analysed more systematically. It is suggested that there are a number of problems with the notion of 'best practice', both in relation to the meaning of specific practices, and their consistency with each other, and the claims that this version of HRM is universally applicable. The unitarist underpinnings of this literature are also exposed. This is not to argue that HR policies and practices do not influence organizational performance but, rather, that we cannot determine this from the current literature. The 'best practice' conclusions may be attractive but the jury is still out.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85ca3c1a0d3924efc64b98e5a6c7f78cfa155ebe

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In General Health Professions

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Citations in the corpus

Human resource management systems and organizational performance: a test of a mediating model in the Greek manufacturing context (2006, background): “…and Anantharaman, 2003; Roberts, 1997); promotion arrangements (Guest, 1997; Pfeffer, 1995); incentive schemes (GomezMejia and Wellbourne, 1988; Marchington and Grugulis, 2000); benefits (Mowday et al., 1982; Paul and Anantharaman, 2003); employee participation (Harel and Tzafrir, 1999;…”
HR practices, organizational climate and employee outcomes: evaluating social exchange relationships in local government (2007, background): “, 1986 , 1990 ), some commentators are concerned that high exchange relationships are leading to adverse worker outcomes, such as reduced quality of life and increased work-related pressure (Godard, 2001 ; Marchington and Grugulis, 2000 ; Green, 2004 ).”
Strategic human resource management: integrating the universalistic, contingent, configurational and contextual perspectives (2005, background): “…because of the narrowness of its objectives, as well as because of the mechanistic and rational nature of its explanations, which fail when considered as crucial issues in the analysis of SHRM (Jackson et al., 1989; Delery and Doty, 1996; Marchington and Grugulis, 2000; Cappelli and Neumark, 2001).”
Satisfaction with HR practices and commitment to the organisation: why one size does not fit all (2005, background): “Various authors have questioned these assumptions because of the differences between intended HR policies and employees’ experience (Wright and Boswell, 2002; Paul and Anantharaman, 2003; Purcell et al, 2003), because complex organisations have different types of employees who may be managed success”
Causal relationship between HRM policies and organisational performance: Evidence from the Greek manufacturing sector (2010, background): “…little doubt that there has been a growing recognition of the importance of training and development as a source of sustained competitive advantage as employers introduce more skill-specific forms of training and experience continuing skills shortage in some areas (Marchington and Grugulis, 2000).”
Critical social science, pragmatism and the realities of HRM (2010, background): “The analytical weakness of the ‘unitarist’ conception of the work organisation which so much HRM research tends to adopt has been exposed by Marchington and Grugulis ( 2000 ).”
Crossing the level of employee's performance: HPWS, affective commitment, human capital, and employee job performance in professional service organizations (2011, background): “Therefore, all of the aforementioned organizational efforts constitute incentives for the employees more willing to reciprocate with the ‘good deeds’ to their organization (Marchington and Grugulis 2000; Guthrie 2001).”
HRM and organizational performance in northern and southern Europe (2008, background): “There is little agreement as to which HRM practices can be considered as strategic (Paauwe 2004 ; Marchington and Grugulis 2004 ).”
High-involvement practices and performance of French firms (2004, background): “increase control, stress and efforts for the good of the company performance but not for the employees (Pil and MacDuffie, 1996; Marchington and Grugulis, 2000).”
Globalizing human resource management (2004, background): “Marchington and Grugulis (2000) similarly highlight some of the key methodological problems associated with the use of data sets trying to identify the effect of HRM on performance.”
High-involvement work processes, work intensification and employee well-being (2008, background): “…performance, there is the problem that data that simply count practices, or even the proportion of the workforce covered by them, do not account for variations in how the practice is implemented, which is critical from the worker perspective (e.g. Marchington and Grugulis, 2000; Purcell, 1999).”
Strategic Human Resource Practices and Product Innovation (2008, background): “…approach typically argues that some HR practices are always better than others and that therefore all organizations should adopt these practices (Marchington and Grugalis 2000), contingency scholars argue that for HR practices to be effective they must be consistent with other aspects of the…”