Running head: MODELS OF HRM 1

Models of Human Resource Management(HRM)

Human Resource Management (HRM) has its main emphasis on the ‘people’ or

‘humanistic’ dimension of an organization. The main functions consist of integrating various

systematic processes and practices for acquiring, developing, and motivating people to

perform and help achieve their organizational objectives. According to Bratton and Gold

(2007), Human Resource Management is defined as “a strategic approach to managing

employment relations which emphasizes that leveraging people’s capabilities is crucial to

achieving competitive advantage, this being achieved through a distinctive set of integrated

employment policies, programs and practices” (Bratton & Gold, 2007, p.7).

A set of defined features of HRM which provide analytical framework is known as a

model. HRM models act as an apparatus and is crucial in investigating and understanding the

dynamics of organizations in any given context. These models help in providing

characteristics of HRM which help in establishing variables and their respective relationships

to be researched. The main models of HRM include:

The Harvard Model

This model focuses on human relations, willingness to create and work as well as

individual’s talents and skills. In this framework, employees are considered as resources,

with a key distinction that unlike machine or other resources, human resources cannot be

managed homogenously and in a similar fashion. Here, employees are considered as the key

stakeholders in the organization. The model propounded by Beer et al., (1984) describes six

main components such as, stakeholder interests, situational factors, HRM policy choices, HR

outcomes, long-term consequences and feedback loop wherein the output flows directly to
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the organization and to the stakeholders. This in turn leads to 4Cs namely, commitment,

congruence, competence and cost effectiveness.

Advantages. This model derives a multi-dimensional construct under the component

of long-term consequences, indicating the organizations derive their right to exist and their

resources from the society. The components such as stakeholder interests and situational

factors are vital in affecting the policies in the organization in terms of molding employees’

influence, human resource flow, reward and work systems. Employees and influence placed

by them are important in determining decision-making skills, employee agency or gaining an

insight into the shaping of their jobs and employees’ perceived ownership of their job.

Disadvantages. Although a lot of HR managers adopt this model, it is not devoid of

shortfalls. Many HR managers are of opinion that, this model could improve in terms of

better feedback processes of outcomes-positive or negative, in a complex environment. If a

proper link between stakeholders and situational factors is not established by the feedback

loop, the organization as a whole is vulnerable to unintended consequences. This discrepancy

in fetching feedbacks could also lead to a lack of coherence between HR teams’ policy

choices and their outcomes and thus, HR teams end up working within narrow limitations.

The Guest Model

David Guest (1989, 1997) propounded this model comprising of six dimensions of

analysis such as, HRM strategy, HR practices, HRM outcomes, behavior outcomes,

performance outcomes and financial outcomes. This model is considered as an idealistic one

with the belief that the fundamental elements of HRM have direct relationship with

organizational consequences. It is also based on the assumption that HRM is distinct from the

traditional personnel management.

Advantages. This model stresses on considering employees as valuable assets to an

organization, whereby they have to be strategically managed to achieve the goals of the

organization. It also focuses on strategic integration, which is the ability to balance business

and HRM strategies; qualitative measures that are to be adopted to manage employees, for

instance, employee surveys to get a clear picture of their needs as well as to ensure their

productivity levels.

Disadvantages. Though this model focuses on employee growth and overall

employee relationship, it is vital to understand that, the best of the employees in the

organization do not put up their best performance, if their relationship within the organization

is unhealthy. As a matter of fact, it might also tend to dissatisfy their customers. The problem

with employee relationship is much like an iceberg. The visible part of the relationship

maybe just the tip of the iceberg, the underlying factors determining the quality of

relationship is latent.

Best Practice Model

This model, championed by Pleffer (1994) adopts a universalistic perspective which

states that all organizations will see an improvement in their performance if they adopt it.

Best practice consists of activities which forge high levels of workforce competence,

encourage ideas from motivated employees and introduce a work design to kickstart

employee commitment.

Advantages. With this model, the organizations can obtain competitive advantage as

it creates an avenue for training and development, which will most likely to lead to high

employee commitment towards getting things done. This model also initiates focus programs

which can maneuver the organization to a better position and also, acts as a guide to setting

priorities and directions which limit mistakes in the work being done.
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Disadvantages. The Distinct Human Practice approach pioneered by Cappelli and

Crocker (1996) opined that many successful companies find a way to differentiate between

themselves in order to gain the competitive advantage. This practice also considers the

essence of organizational strategy to create distinctive competencies, which was highly

lacking in the Best Practice Model. Power distance as to how social inequality is perceived

differently in myriad cultures has an effect on the successful implementation of best practice

approaches. Another factor which isn’t taken into consideration in this approach is how

individualistic dimension is relative and dynamic in the social world.

Storey’s Hard and Soft Framework

Storey (1989) advocated two frameworks of HRM, the first one being the hard model

which is embedded in manpower planning with a concern towards aligning the human

resource strategy with business strategy, while the second one being the soft model which has

its roots in the human relations school with a concern towards employees’ outcomes and

encouraging commitment to the organization by focusing on employees’ outcomes.

Advantages. Few of the advantages of hard model include minimization of costs due

to well-monitoring of the staff members, greater centralization and control by managers,

flexibility rendered to increase or decrease outputs by the organization and emphasis on

equality and diversity of the workforce.

The advantages offered by soft model include efficient maintenance of employee

collaboration, usage of right employee for the right job demands, increase the positive

consequences of job satisfaction like creativity, cooperation, team building as well as helping

employees reach highest level of their participation in organizations.

Disadvantages. The main disadvantage of hard model is encountered in achieving

production efficiency permanently because of stagnation and monotony work, tiredness of

employees and the very feeling there is lack of autonomy in the organizations, which compel

employees to be discouraged with their jobs.

Disadvantages of soft model include increased costs incurred in skill training

programmes, delaying the decision-making process to synthesize employees with the

management and also leads to dissatisfaction if the value of middle managers’ is not

appreciated.

Patterson’s Model

Patterson’s Model (1997) states that an organization can elevate their performance by

improving the skills and abilities of the employees, increasing motivation and by providing

amplified responsibilities for employees to showcase and utilize their skills and abilities.

These factors determine good or high performance of an organization.

Advantages. Factors determining high performance in an organization enhances

employee effectiveness. A study published in Journal of Applied Psychology helps us to

understand how high-performance work systems (HPWS) contribute to group performance

and found that HPWS had a positive effect on employee attitudes which in turn enhanced the

organizational citizenship behavior of employees.

Disadvantages. The increase in responsibilities on the part of employees may

increase employees’ workload, as a result of which they may initially experience difficulty in

re-prioritizing their time and task, and can cause employees to get frustrated, burnt out and

lower productivity levels.

Best Fit or Contingency Model

This model emphasizes the alignment of HR strategies and organizational strategies.

It also states that HR strategy becomes more effective when it is linked with the environment
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or the surroundings of the business. It primarily consists of two aspects- the organization

itself and the surrounding societal environment.

Advantages. This model proves to be prominent in attracting employees and in

employee retention (Gordon & Kaswin, 2010, p.2). It also allows the organization to develop

a specific reward package that would likely attract the applicants. This also means tailoring

the rewards package to the target applicants that the organization wish to attract. This kind of

flexibility is the key advantage found in this model.

Disadvantages. Best fit policies are not static as they are often amended as per

changes in the organization’s strategy to respond to competition. Changing expectations may

lead to frustration among employees. This model is a continual work in progress and its flaw

focuses on the limited capacity to search for contingencies as well as to depict their inter-

connection to the organization.

10C’s Model

The architect of this model is Alan Price (1997) and this model is considered as one

of the most pragmatic models of HRM as it reflects all the pivotal principles of HRM. This

model has its origins from the 4Cs of HRM and consist of ten essential principles-

comprehensiveness, credibility, communication, cost effectiveness, creativity, coherence,

competence, control, change and commitment.

Advantages. The principles proposed by this model, if effectively implemented will

result in higher productivity in the organization by helping in building a conducive

organizational culture, in developing healthy human relations and, will lessen the turnover

rates and workplace accidents.

Disadvantages. However, disadvantages might creep up in terms of resistance to

adaptability of new organizational rules, increasing costs of setups, installations and training
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programmes, unpredictability as to whether or not to invest in temporary employees and

ultimately, time constraints of whether to invest a lot of time in orienting the employees when

they are needed the most in business activities.

Key Learnings

The Harvard model is practiced by solving the historical problems of personnel

management when managers come up with an idea which looks into the participative nature

of employees, by imparting the required skills to employees and by inquiring into the policies

and practices of HRM. Devoid of a common vision, these managerial functions reduce to

remain as a group of independent activities; each surrounded by its own tradition or practice.

Whereas, the Guest Model differentiates itself from personnel management, it has a unitary

belief and fails to recognize the importance of trade unions, emphasizing the relationship as

the one prevailing between employees and organizations. Best fit model is concerned with

the alignment of organizational and HR strategies together but it is seen to have a huge

appeal to the HR practitioners due to the fact that it positions them as the first-level strategic

partners in the process of managerial decision-making while best practice claims a

universalistic perspective that all organizations will improvise to its maximum potential,

which in reality is has a major shortfall in terms of insufficient methodology and theoretical

definition of what constitutes best practice to be adopted. With regards to Storey’s Hard and

Soft framework, the organizations are seen to have a mixture of this model unique to the

nature of the organization which implies that external and internal environment have a vital

role to play in the way HRM operates. Patterson’s model emphasizes on elevating employee

productivity in terms of training and development but fails to focus its attention towards the

impact of dynamic responsibilities on employees’ psychological health. The 10C’s model

consists of all the fundamental principles of HRM but contains loopholes with regard to how
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to manage uncertainties encountered in the organizations and probabilities of investments in

‘successful’ training programmes.

In conclusion, models can be applied to various aspects of an organization, which

help depict how, by whom and in which direction essential steps have to be adopted to

achieve the desired result. An organization which builds for itself a proper human resource

management system, gains competitive advantage. Such an organization can also be socially

responsible and can build value-centered activities that maybe mutually beneficial to

organization and stakeholders.

References

Bratton, J. & Gold, J. (2007). Human Resource Management: Theory and Practice (4th ed.).

Houndmills: Macmillian.

Guest, D.E. (2011). Human Resource Management and Performance: A Review and

Research Agenda. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 8(3), p. 263-

276. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/095851997341630

Gordon, A.A. & Kaswin, J.L. (2010). Effective Employee Incentive Plans: Features and

Implementation Processes. Cornell HR Review. Retrieved from Cornell University, ILR

School Site:

https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/

&httpsredir=1&article=1011&context=chrr

Paauwe, J. & Boon, C. (2009). Strategic HRM: A Critical Review. Retrieved from

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241848783_Strategic_HRM_A_critical_review

Radcliffe, D. (2005). Critique on Human Resources Theory. Otago Management Review, 3.

Retrieved from:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9c6e/403101034e6470afaad5805ebba1b5a69c3f.pdf

Sengupta, A. (2018). Human Resource Management: Concepts, Practices and New

Paradigms (1st ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.