International Human Resource Management
The field of human resources management (HRM) has undergone several seismic shifts in the last 30 years, and these shifts cause businesses to challenge old concepts of dealing with employees. One of the results of this different thinking is that the whole spate of activities that were once handled by the department usually known as "personnel" are now either handled by a department called "human resources", or even turned over to an outside firm for management. This change reflects the concept that people, the human capital, are quite important, in fact, essential to any organization.
A further complication in the field is that "personnel" or "human resources" (whatever we call it) has tended, until the last twenty years or so, to be specifically one culture. This is quite possibly because most of the developments in the field came from American companies, so the concepts were essentially American. Today's international business environment, as characterized by Barnatt (1997) has only one consistency -- uncertainty. He cites this as being due to the fact that
The desire for ever-increasing flexibility in business operations [leads to] the 'virtual organization' - of an extremely loose web of individuals, capital and technologies which may operate in amalgamation as the ultimate flexible organizational form" (Barnatt,1997 36).
It can be argued that in no part of the corporate business model is this uncertainty more prevalent than in the field of human resources.
Scholars in the field of strategic human resource management (HRM) focus on "the pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable the firm to achieve its goals," (Wright, 1998, 32).
This focus emphasizes two types of congruence or fit. First, all HRM strategies must fit within the strategic long range goals of the company -- i.e., build better products, capture market share, incr...