Hrms odisha emerged in the UK due to a variety of factors affecting the British market; growing poverty in British society; globalisation; pressure from the Pacific Rim economic area; introduction of new technology; declining trade unionism; the lack of skills within the British labour market and the adoption of market outside finance systems, all of which led to the development of employer-orientated employment policies.
However, the uptake of the High commitment model of HRM has been restricted to the ‘cost reducer’ type and the pertinence of a ‘situational contingency.’ A limiting factor to the uptake of high commitment HRM in the UK was the fact that organisations operating in the British market do not compete with each other on the basis of the quality or the profile of their workforce.
The popularity of the term HRM was as a result of major changes in product markets in the 1980s, led by the entrepreneurialism promoted by Thatcher, in part encouraged by privatisation and anti-union legislation. These structural changes introduced by Thatcher to the UK economy provided a fertile climate for management experimentation with practices of employee involvement.
The emergence of HRM was timely in that it resonated with socio-political climate at the time. The Conservative government reforms of the labour market allowed managers to exercise an unprecedented degree of strategic choice in shaping organisational employment practices.
HRM Theory
Guest developed a model of High Commitment HRM that distinguished between a ‘soft’ and ‘hard”version of HRM. In developing his model he highlighted the danger of comparing ideal models of HRM with a descriptive model of the practice of personnel management because there are significant differences between the ‘stereotypes’ of personnel management and HRM.
Devanna introduced a contingency, or The Matching Model of HRM introduced the concept of strategic HRM in which HRM policies are aligned to strategic organisational objectives, both in the formulation of those objectives and the implementation of activities to achieve them. The Matching model is a hard interpretation of HRM, as it focuses on the deployment of human resources in pursuit of meeting the needs of the organisation. This includes selecting the most suitable people to meet business needs, performance management and providing feedback and rewarding appropriate performance. In the development of the workforce, the focus is on developing the skills and knowledge required to meet organisation objectives.
Beer developed the Map of HRM Territory, in recognition of the variety of stakeholders in the organisation. The models main influence is based less on the considerations of stakeholder interests and situational factors and more on the benefits to employers of adopting a ‘soft’ approach to HRM that seeks to enhanced the quality and commitment of the workforce.
Key Challenges
One of the key challenges to high commitment HRM has been the ambiguity in the uncertain boundary between personnel management as a separate specialist function and as a description of a set of activities undertaken by all managers. This has been further exacerbated because of the continuing debate among academics and practitioners regarding the link between bundles of HR practices and performance and whether the search for the holy grail of a HR-performance link is, in the words of Karen Legge, “a silver bullet or a spent cartridge.”
The continuing overwhelming emphasis on shareholder value as the key business driver, above the interests of other stakeholders, including employees, and the expansion of the Hour Glass Economy, whereby there has been a rise in the number of well-paid jobs, and an increase in poorly paid jobs, which has squeezed the number of jobs in the middle has depleted the influence of soft HRM practices which aim to increase engagement and commitment of employees.
