Human Resource Management

For many organizations facing high rates of employee turnover, strategies for increasing employee retention may not be practical because employees leave for reasons beyond the control of management or the costs of reducing turnover exceed the benefits to be derived. In this situation managers need to consider strategies that can minimize or buffer the organization from the negative consequences that often follow from turnover. Strategies organizations can use to adapt to uncontrollably high employee turnover rates are presented in this article. In addition, suggestions are made for how managers should make choices among the alternative strategies.

Gainsharing is an important organization development intervention, yet many of the basic questions have not been answered. This paper addresses these questions by developing a conceptual model and using the model to review the case study literature on gainsharing . The plans varied in terms of structural factors, implementation factors, and situational factors, and a majority were successful. Gainsharing impact was found in five key areas: organizational effectiveness, individual quality of work life, ideas and innovation, labor-management cooperation, and pay. Relevant research is briefly reviewed and several unanswered questions are identified for future research.

Blue Cross of California--a nonprofit corporation--is refocusing itself strategically to become competitive in the rapidly changing health field. It must improve its ability to manage the transition for several years to come. Sustained effort's to ensure continuity will involve generating commitment to the vision of the "new" Blue Cross of California beyond a small, core group of executives at the top, down into middle management and lower level workers. A premium will be placed on developing people skills to deal with innovation and new products, and slowly fostering the new culture.

Present patterns of productive activity are neither well recognized, optimal for society, nor in accordance with individual preference. Although a great deal of attention has been given to meeting people's needs for income, medical care, and other services, the quality of their lives must also be defined by what they do for themselves and for others. In discovering present patterns of productive activity throughout the life course and optimizing those patterns, we will raise the quality of American life. To accomplish this task, two great changes are needed: we must recognize the full range of productive activities throughout the life course and give people the opportunity to modify the allocation of paid employment.

The energy crisis is going to change our assumptions about employment policies—much more so than we've admitted to ourselves. Let's face up to it.

The concept of organizational culture is here applied to the practice of human resource management. Reasons for the current emphasis on culture as an organizational metaphor are suggested. Cultural indicators which have diagnostic value for human resource professionals include organizational usage of symbols, rituals, ideologies, language, stores, myths, relationships, and humor. Examples of these indicators of culture are drawn from a variety of HRM practices and functions to explore the implications of each indicator. Alternative strategies are presented for improving the management of organizational change through sensitivity to cultural impact and better utilization of existing cultural realities.

Traditionally, strategic planners and human resource professionals have taken separate approaches in their attempts to improve organization functioning. As a result, strategic planners lack important information that affects the implementation of their plans and human resource managers have little impact on the strategic direction of their organizations. The University of Michigan, Hay Associates, and The Strategic Planning Institute have come together in a new venture to build a multicompany database that links organization characteristics and human resource and strategic planning practices with data on company financial performance. The database will be used to make intercompany comparisons on significant organization variables and to identify those practices that lead to improved financial performance.

Using linked data for British workplaces and employees we find a low base rate of workplacelevel availability for five family-friendly work practices - parental leave, paid leave, job sharing, subsidized child care, and working at home - and a substantially lower rate of individual-level perceived accessibility. Our results demonstrate that statistics on workplace availability drastically overstate the extent to which employees perceive that family-friendly are accessible to them personally. British workplaces appear to be responding slowly and perhaps disingenuously to pressures to enhance family-friendly work practices.

We see our society moving more and more into a smothering straightjacket of legalisms and red tape; the effect of his trend on the conduct of personnel work is not encouraging. What are Personnel managers doing about it?

In an address to members of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, Hazel Henderson congratulated them on their stated purpose: “to foster the integrity of business in its dealings with consumers,” but added the whether they can also simultaneously “promote harmonious relationships between business, government and consumers” is another matter—one for honest differences of opinion.

The well-publicized waves of layoffs in recent years have destroyed the long-standing psychological contract between employees and their employers which promised pay, promotion, and job security in exchange for worker skills, effort, and loyalty. This article provides empirical support for the transformational effect layoffs have had on psychological contracts and discusses the critical role human resource management must play in establishing and developing new contracts to guide future employment relationships between employers and employees. Implications for both academics and practitioners are provided. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This article considers what corporations' attitudes toward women will be in the year 2000, and what women's attitudes toward corporations will be at that time. Women's current position in the workforce is characterized. Consideration is given to the direction today's workplace is taking as it transitions to the start of a new century. Based on current observations and trends, the article explores the needs and desires of the twenty-first century woman. Four major tools available to U.S. corporations preparing to enter the next century are discussed, including family issues, a commitment to innovation, training, and women's contributions to the management of transition.

Global firms often struggle to replicate practices among their culturally and geographically dispersed subsidiaries. Part of the reason for this is that certain practices, including human resource management (HRM) practices, are complex and context specific. In this study, we develop a framework to help identify how firms might overcome challenges of practice replication through alignment of information systems, application processes, and people. We find that managerial alignment of formal processes and systems, along with informal alignment of people (shared objectives), improve the capability of a multinational corporation (MNC) to replicate human resource practices across subsidiaries. We also discuss managerial implications. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Considerable attention has focused on how multinational corporations (MNCs) deal with the simultaneous pressures of globalization and localization when it comes to human resource management (HRM). HR function activities in this process, however, have received less focus. The study presented here identifies configurations of the corporate HR function based on international HRM (IHRM) structures, exploring how issues of interdependency shape corporate HR roles. The study is based on 248 interviews in 16 MNCs based in 19 countries. The findings are applied to develop a contextually based framework outlining the main corporate HR function configurations in MNCs, including new insights into methods of IHRM practice design. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

In the 1980s many organizations gained competitive advantage through downsizing and financial restructuring. The 1990s confront us with the need to get back to basics. Large organizations are searching for a competitive advantage by being faster than their competitors in satisfying customer needs. These competitive organizations are capable of ongoing adaptation to environmental demands. In this article the authors speculate on the way these “self-renewing” organizations are organized, the managerial processes that enable them to capitalize on speed, and the characteristics of the leaders who manage them.

Not much can be done to save international executivism from disappearing gradually under the impact of growing nationalism, but companies with foreign affiliates can note the symptoms of a concerted push to discourage foreign managers and take some measures, discussed here, to prolong–possibly–the practice of placing foreign managers.